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Chara Eirene Abiera Diaz, Program Manager, EV Technology, Element Materials Technology
Chara Diaz is the Department Manager of Element’s Hopkinton, Massachusetts laboratory, a facility that focuses primarily on EV cell performance testing. She has a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering with an emphasis on renewable energy from San Jose State University and has worked in many facets of the battery industry from coating and cell building to testing. Chara comes to Element with experience in data analysis for various OEMs ranging from consumer electronics to electric vehicles.
Daniel P. Abraham, PhD, Senior Materials Scientist, Argonne National Laboratory
Dr. Daniel Abraham conducts research on lithium batteries used in electric vehicles, consumer electronics, and grid energy storage. He has authored over 180 articles in peer-reviewed journals and delivered over 350 technical presentations in popular, academic, and industrial settings. His work enables the development of materials and components that enhance battery performance, life, and safety. Dr. Abraham is also a research advisor and mentor to various undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral associates, and junior scientists. He has received awards for “exceptional work in developing the next generation of scientists and engineers.”
William Adams, Head of Battery Research, Cobalt & Lithium & Battery Materials Research, Fastmarkets
William has been involved in the metals markets since 1986, he runs the research for Fastmarkets battery metals and oversees base and precious metals research. Fastmarkets as a Price Reporting Agency (PRA) provides price discovery on the battery raw materials and Fastmarkets Research aims to provide a clear and focused understanding of the metals markets. Prior to working for Fastmarkets, William worked with Rudolf Wolff & Co Ltd, which was one of the founding members of the London Metal Exchange, where he gained broad insight into all aspects of the metals markets, working in their London, New York and Tokyo offices.
Philipp Adelhelm, PhD, Professor, Institute of Chemistry, Humboldt-University Berlin
Philipp Adelhelm is a professor for physical chemistry at Humboldt-University Berlin. His current main interest is research on sustainable batteries. After studying materials science at the University of Stuttgart, he moved to the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam (department of Professor Antionetti / Smarsly, 2005-2007) for his doctoral project. This was followed by a 2-year postdoctoral stay at the University of Utrecht (Professor de Jongh) and then a position as a junior research group leader at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Justus Liebig University in Giessen (Professor Janek, 2009-2015). From 2015-2019 he was a professor at the Institute for Technical Chemistry and Environmental Chemistry at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. He has been a professor at the Institute for Chemistry at Humboldt-University since 2019, and heads a joint research group on operando battery analysis at the Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin (HZB).
Kamyab Amouzegar, Hydro Quebec
Dr. Amouzegar is a lead senior researcher at Hydro-Quebec's Center of Excellence in Transportation Electrification and Energy Storage (CETEES). He worked as scientist at Hydro-Quebec research institute, IREQ, on the development and scale up of several innovative and patented electrochemical and chemical processes between 1995 and 2001. He worked as VP of Technology at SAM Electron Technologies (a spin-off from the HQ Cerium oxidation electrochemical process applied to the production of vitamin K) as well as Director of R&D and Head of Innovation at Lonza, a multinational pharmaceutical company before joining the CETEES in 2015. He studied pharmacy at the Complutense University in Madrid and completed his Master’s degree and his PhD at ecole Polytechnique of Montreal in electrochemistry (electrocatalysis). He has more than 25 years of experience in R&D, scale up and commercial operation of electrochemical processes. The main focus of his current activities is on the development of lithium batteries materials as well as recycling of lithium batteries.
Matt Anders, Divisional Manager, Energy & Battery Storage, Piper Maddox
I am a Divisional Manager at Piper Maddox, heading up our Battery Storage team with a special focus on battery manufacturing/R&D. I have been fully embedded within this industry for the past 5 years, and have developed a passion for not only the industry, but helping individuals and businesses continue to grow and succeed. Batteries are the future of transportation and a more stable, sustainable grid. It's crucial that we build out a better supply chain- not only of batteries and their materials, but of individuals able to innovate and manufacture them as well.
Robert Anstey, CEO and Founder, GDI
Mr. Anstey is the CEO/Founder of GDI. He has over a decade of experience as an entrepreneur, globally commercializing technologies in energy storage and advanced materials. He is a co-inventor on >15 patent filings, and 7 issued patents. He works on technologies that fight climate change, and focuses on the intersection between manufacturing, strategy, and business development. Mr. Anstey is a proponent of open innovation and accelerating technology development through partnerships.
Brian Barnett, PhD, President, Battery Perspectives
Dr. Brian Barnett founded Battery Perspectives, LLC which provides consulting services related to battery technology and battery safety. Dr. Barnett has extensive experience in assessment, development and commercialization of battery technology. He is recognized as both a technical and industry expert related to batteries and an expert in battery safety and has directed a series of successful lab-based, highly multidisciplinary battery technology development programs that resulted in technology licensing or sale.
Kevin Beaty, President, YUNEV LLC
Mr. Beaty is President of YUNEV LLC, where he consults and advises corporations, government organizations, institutional investors, startups, and other privately held firms. Prior to forming YUNEV, Mr. Beaty held a series of executive, technology and business leadership roles at CALSTART, Eaton Corporation (NYSE: ETN), Woodward Controls (NASDAQ: WWD), and Southwest Research Institute (SwRI). His innovative career record includes launching and managing advanced powertrain products and businesses in the commercial vehicle industry. Mr. Beaty works on E-Mobility and Smart Mobility programs in the commercial vehicle industry, with a special focus on building a more efficient battery supply chain. Under his leadership, strategic businesses within Eaton, Woodward and SwRI experienced profitable growth resulting from Mr. Beaty’s skills in commercializing new powertrain technologies and building collaborative partnerships with leading global Truck/Bus/Engine OEMs, Tier 1 Suppliers, and Fleet customers.
Jeremy Bedine, Product Head, Volvo Energy
Jeremy Bedine is Head of Product, North America for Volvo Energy. He is responsible for Volvo Energy’s Energy Storage product strategy for North America. Jeremy has more than 15 years of experience leading energy strategy and product operations, including energy storage, in the commercial and industrial (C&I), as well as the utility sectors. Prior to joining Volvo, Jeremy led the Service Planning and Contracts Management team at Tesla. His team devised the roadmap for the Energy Storage service offering and led service planning for all projects during the design and engineering phases. He was responsible for negotiating the Long Term Service Agreements with utilities, and he supported the service organization to ensure contract compliance across Tesla’s entire commercial project portfolio. He has worked extensively with utilities and power producers (IPPs) in project development for large scale renewables, and supported the Department of Defense in establishing the US Army Office of Energy Initiatives. Jeremy earned his BA in Economics from Brown University and an MS in Energy Policy and Climate from Johns Hopkins University. Jeremy has 3 children, and he splits his time between Greensboro, NC and Baltimore, MD.
Lukasz Bednarski, Associate Director, Battery Raw Materials, IHS Markit
Lukasz Bednarski is an associate director at IHS Markit. He covers battery materials market with particular focus on lithium, graphite, manganese, cathodes, and anodes materials. Lukasz has worked in the commodity sector spanning physical trading, training, product management, and research. Prior to joining, his interest in battery materials led to the development of an independent industry portal covering the sector. In addition to his degree in economics and business administration from Aalborg University, Lukasz has studied financial topics in China, Russia, Germany, and Liechtenstein. He is the author of popular non-fiction book "Lithium: The Global Race for Battery Dominance and the New Energy Revolution.”
Ilias Belharouak, PhD, Section Head, Electrification and Energy Infrastructure Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Dr. Ilias Belharouak is a Distinguished Scientist and the Leader of the Battery Roll-to-Roll Manufacturing Group in the Energy and Transportation Sciences Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Tennessee. Dr. Belharouak also serves as a Professor of the Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Before joining ORNL, he was a Research Director and the Founding Chief Scientist of the Electrochemical Energy Storage Center in Qatar Foundation. He was a Material Scientist and Battery Expert in the Chemical Sciences and Engineering Division at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Illinois. Dr. Belharouak is currently an Editor of the Elsevier’s Journal of Power Sources. He was recognized with several awards including R&D-100 innovation awards and topical society awards. Dr. Belharouak authored more than 150 peer-reviewed papers, 30 US Patents and Applications, 5 books, and holds an h-index of 55.
Kimberly Berman, Senior Consultant, SFA Oxford
Kimberly recently joined SFA Oxford (UK) as Principal Consultant, specializing in energy transition materials and related commodities and has researched, written/co-written and published numerous major papers and reports on lithium-ion and next-gen battery technologies, alternative fuels, electric vehicles, stationary power storage and the deglobalisation of battery supply chains. Previously, she worked at BMO Capital Markets and developed the firm’s proprietary industry knowledge around energy transition technologies and completed a short term contract for the World Bank to develop battery raw material policy recommendations for the DRC and the cobalt industry.
Richard D. Braatz, PhD, Edwin R. Gilliland Professor, Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dr. Richard D. Braatz is the Edwin R. Gilliland Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He leads the modeling, control, and systems activities in many biopharmaceutical manufacturing efforts at MIT, including for vaccines, gene therapy, and monoclonal antibodies. Most activities are in automated process development workflows and modeling, design, and control of fully automated modular manufacturing unit operations and end-to-end systems, which are experimentally validated. He has consulted or collaborated with more than 25 companies including Novartis, Pfizer, Merck, Biogen, Sanofi, and Amgen. Honors include the AIChE PD2M Award for Outstanding Contribution to QbD for Drug Substance, the AIChE Separation Division Innovation Award, the AIChE Excellence in Process Development Research Award, the Research Collaboration Award from the Council for Chemical Research, and the IEEE Control Systems Society Transition to Practice Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Carlton Brown, Vice President Global Product Management, Dukosi
Mr. Brown began his work with battery technologies developing a solar-electric race car at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, where he earned a Bachelors of Science in Electrical Engineering. Over the last two decades he developed production battery pack systems for four OEMs and was awarded three patents. Today Mr. Brown is Vice President Global Product Management at Dukosi, bringing revolutionary chip-on-cell BMS products to the market.
Peter G. Bruce, PhD, Wolfson Chair & Professor, Materials, University of Oxford
My primary research interests are in the fields of solid state chemistry and electrochemistry; particularly solid state ionics, which embraces ionically conducting solids and intercalation compounds. I am interested in the fundamental science of ionically conducting solids (ceramic and polymeric materials) and intercalation compounds, in the synthesis of new materials with new properties or combinations of properties, in understanding these properties and in exploring their applications in new devices, especially energy storage devices such as rechargeable lithium batteries. Although ionically conducting solids represent the starting point for much of our research, we have extended our interests well beyond the confines of this subject alone.
Andrew Brudnok, Vice President, PGMs & Nickel Specialty Products, Norilsk Nickel USA
Andrew Brudnok joined Norilsk Nickel USA, Inc., a Pennsylvania Company based in Pittsburgh, PA as VP, Sales - PGMs + Nickel Specialty Products in August 2021. In this capacity, Andrew has responsibility for Norilsk Nickel’s sales and market development for Nickel Products to the Battery, Catalyst, Chemical, and Plating industries in North & South America. He also oversees PGM sales in North America. Norilsk Nickel, or Nornickel, is the world’s largest high-grade nickel and palladium producer, along with other metals essential for the development of a low-carbon economy and green transport. Over a 35 year commodity career, with particular emphasis on Nickel products, Andrew has held Management roles with Philipp Brothers, Inc., Billiton Stratcor, Traxys, Thyssenkrupp Materials Trading, as well as 15 years directing BHP’s Nickel Sales in North America.
Kumar Bugga, Senior Fellow, Lyten
Ratnakumar Bugga (Kumar), is Senior Fellow at Lyten, San Jose, developing lithium-sulfur batteries for EVs. Previously, Dr. Bugga spent 34 years at NASA/JPL as Principal Technologist. researching various advanced battery technologies for planetary missions, e.g., lithium and lithium-ion batteries high temperature batteries for Venus, low-temperature batteries for Mars, and solid electrolyte batteries. He was the battery lead for the successful Mars Rover missions and supported several NASA missions.
Paul Burke, PhD, CTO, Pure Lithium
Paul Burke has been leading research and commercialization of new technologies for 12 years and holds patents related to electrochemistry, batteries, and additive manufacturing. He worked with Professor Donald Sadoway at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the Research Director of GroupSadoway. Paul worked on the Liquid Metal Battery project and contributed to Ambri’s patents. He holds a Ph.D. in materials engineering from Dalhousie University.
Mei Cai, Director, Battery Cell Systems Research Lab, General Motors Global R&D Center
Dr. Mei Cai is the director of Battery Cell Systems Research at General Motors Global R&D Center. She is responsible for technology innovations in advanced battery materials/chemistries for future electric vehicles. Mei has 25 years of industrial R&D experience including extensive experience in novel materials processing for automotive applications. She has managed multi-million-dollar R&D projects in the development of low-cost and durable vehicular energy storage materials and systems. Mei was recognized as the 2021 Women of Color Technologist of the Year and 2018 Asian American Engineer of the Year for her contributions in fundamental research and technology development. She is the author or co-author of more than 100 scientific publications and holds 118 issued US patents.
Yunhong Che, PhD, Assistant Professor, Aalborg University
Yunhong Che received the B.E. and M.S. degrees in the College of Mechanical and Vehicle Engineering from Chongqing University, Chongqing, China, in 2019 and 2021, respectively. He is currently pursuing the PhD degree with the Department of Energy, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark. He was a visiting PhD student with the Institute of Civil Engineering at EPFL, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland, and the Department of Energy Science and Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, USA, in 2023. His research interests include battery health estimation and prediction, fault diagnostics, physics-informed machine learning in modeling and prognostics, and smart health management for energy storage systems.
Zheng Chen, PhD, Assistant Professor, NanoEngineering, University of California San Diego
Dr. Zheng Chen is an Associate Professor in NanoEngineering and Program of Chemical Engineering at UC San Diego. Chen has received the NASA’s 2018 Early Career Faculty Award, the LG Chem Global Battery Innovation Contest (BIC) Award in 2018, and the 2018 ACF PRF New Investigator Award. He has been selected as a Scialog Fellow in Advanced Energy Storage by Research Corporation and as a participant of 2019 China-America Frontiers of Engineering Symposium (CAFOE), National Academy of Engineering. He has been also recognized as a 2018 Emerging Investigator of Journal of Materials Chemistry C., Chem. Comm. Emerging Investigator of 2020 and Nanoscale Emerging Investigator of 2021. He has been working on Li-ion battery materials for >10 years, including battery chemistries for extreme temperatures, high energy cathodes, silicon/Li anodes, solid-state batteries and battery recycling. He has published >100 journal papers and holds 10 patents.
Steven Chung, Co-Founder CEO, ReJoule
Steven is Co-Founder CEO of ReJoule, an advanced battery diagnostics startup in Southern California. ReJoule is commercializing its patent pending technology, which can grade a battery in minutes rather than hours. Steven was a Standards Technical Panel member on UL1974, the process certification standard for evaluating repurposed batteries. Steven has also been a Power Design Engineer at L-3 Communications, Power Paragon, where he designed and tested military-grade power systems for Navy surface ships and submarines. Steven received a Masters of Applied Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Toronto with a specialization in power electronics for automotive battery systems.
Jason Croy, PhD, Group Leader, Materials Research Group, Electrochemical Energy Storage, Argonne National Lab
Jason Croy Received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Central Florida where his work focused on the electronic, vibrational, and catalytic properties of mono- and bi-metallic nanoparticle systems. In 2010 Jason joined the Electrochemical Energy Storage Theme at Argonne National Laboratory outside of Chicago, IL. His work at Argonne focuses on the design, synthesis, and characterization of high-energy, lithium-ion electrode materials. Dr. Croy is currently the Group Leader of the Materials Research Group at Argonne National Laboratory and the principal investigator of the Department of Energy’s Deep-Dive consortium on “Realizing Next Generation Cathodes for Li-Ion Batteries” consisting of 50 scientists and engineers across 5 national laboratories.
Yi Cui, PhD, Professor, Department of Materials Science & Engineering, and Energy Science & Engineering, Stanford University
Dr. Cui is the Fortinet Founders Professor of Materials Science & Engineering and Energy Science & Engineering. He is the Director of the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford. He studies the fundamentals of nanomaterials and their applications in batteries, catalysts, wearables, carbon capture, mineral extraction and environmental technology. Cui attended the University of Science and Technology of China for a bachelor’s degree in chemistry. He then pursued a PhD in physical chemistry with Charles Lieber at Harvard University, where he worked on silicon nanowires and developed highly sensitive nanoscale sensors. After completing his PhD in 2002, Cui went to the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow hosted by Paul Alivisatos. Cui joined the Stanford faculty in 2005. He has published approximately 550 research papers and has an outstanding H-index impact score of 249 (Google Scholar). In 2014, he was ranked #1 in materials science by Thomson Reuters’ “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds.” In 2022, Cui was an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Materials Research Society, Electrochemical Society, and the Royal Society of Chemistry. He is an associate editor of Nano Letters. He is a co-director of the Battery 500 Consortium, and co-director of Stanford’s StorageX Initiative. His selected awards include the Global Energy Prize (2021), U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Award (2020), MRS Medal (2020), and Blavatnik National Laureate (2017). He has founded five companies to commercialize technologies from his group: Amprius (NYSE: AMPX), 4C Air, EEnotech, EnerVenue and LifeLabs Design Inc.
Eric Darcy, PhD, Battery Technical Discipline Lead, Power Systems, NASA Johnson Space Center
Eric C. Darcy, PhD, has spent his 35-year career at NASA in the areas of battery design, verification, and safety assessments for the rigors of manned spacecraft applications. As Battery Technical Discipline Lead at NASA-JSC, his main objective has been the development of safe, while high-performing, battery systems with a deep focus on understanding, preventing, and mitigating latent defects that could lead to catastrophic cell internal short circuits.
Anthony De Vito, Director, Zero-Emission Vehicles, Core States Energy
Since joining the Core States team, Anthony De Vito has brought great enthusiasm to our sustainable energy programs. An avid educator on clean transportation, he takes every opportunity to share his extensive knowledge with colleagues and clients. Anthony’s expertise includes strategic planning, financial analysis, and site auditing for Electric Vehicle Charging Stations (EVCS) and Hydrogen Fueling Stations (HFS). His service-first management approach to providing engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) solutions to ZEV programs spans a vast range of markets such as existing and developing fleets for offices, corporations, public parking, medical, retail, hospitality, and multi-unit dwellings. For more information click here: https://www.core-states.com/about-us/anthony-devito/
Shmuel De-Leon, CEO, Shmuel De-Leon Energy Ltd.
Shmuel De-Leon, Founder and CEO of Shmuel De-Leon Energy Ltd., is a leading international expert in the business of energy storage. Prior to founding the company, for over 21 years, Shmuel held various positions as an energy storage, electronic engineering, and quality control team manager. Shmuel holds a B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from Tel Aviv University, and an M.B.A. in Quality Control and Reliability Engineering from the Technion Institute in Haifa, as well as an Electronic Technician's diploma.
Stefan Debruyne, Director, Business Development, Lithium, SQM International
Stefan Debruyne joined SQM in 2005 as Asia-Pacific Sales Director, Lithium and Iodine, where he witnessed firsthand the lithium-ion battery production boom in Asia and the emerging electrification of transportation in China. In his present role as Business Development Director, he is focusing on the engagement with the automotive battery value chain and its stakeholders. Prior to joining SQM in 2005, he held a variety of international commercial roles at different listed companies. He has earned a Business Engineering degree from University of Leuven and an executive MBA from Vlerick Business School. He currently works for SQM as Director of Business Development.
Sarah Degras, Polymer Designer, R&D, Blue Solutions Canada, Inc.
Sarah Degras is Synthesis Hub Manager at Blue Solutions Canada, a subsidiary of Blue Solutions, an entity of the Bollore Group and global designer and manufacturer of all-solid-state electric batteries. She joined the company in 2019 as Polymers and Materials Designer and is based in Boucherville (Quebec). With a solid background in polymer chemistry, Sarah Degras manages a team of chemists at Blue Solutions Canada tasked with synthesizing the molecules and polymers to be used in the lithium-metal batteries. Her primary mission is to take into account the constraints or concepts related to those batteries when determining the best way to synthesize a new material. Although electronic and ionic conduction mainly involve electrochemistry, chemistry of interfaces-which is often overlooked-is also crucial for optimizing battery performance. Sarah Degras has a PhD in the synthesis of bio-based polymers from Claude Bernard University (Lyon I) and a Master’s degree in green chemistry and polymeric materials from the ecole Nationale Superieure de Chimie in Lille (ENCSL). Before joining Blue Solutions Canada, she worked on the synthesis of bio-based polymers for a variety of green chemistry applications including paint, membrane filtration for water and gas permeation. Sarah Degras brings a range of valuable skills to the position, including her expertise in the management of industrial R&D projects involving patent drafting (she holds several patents).
Matt Denlinger, Battery Research Engineer, Energy Storage Research, Ford Motor Company
Matt Denlinger is a research engineer at Ford Motor Company’s recently announced Ford Ion Park. He has been working in Lithium-ion battery research since 2009, including 9 years at Ford. During this time, he has focused on battery materials development, safety characterization, and cell design. His current role is centralized on the evaluation and development of next-generation cell technologies for full electric vehicles. Matt also serves as the Technical Advisory Committee Lead for Ford within the United States Advanced Battery Consortium (USABC).
Nathaniel Dick, Business Development Manager, Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina EDPNC
Nathaniel Dick joined the EDPNC (Economic Development Partnership) in November of 2020, bringing with him his knowledge and expertise of the Chinese market. As part of the Business Development team, Nathaniel cultivates business for North Carolina in the North American and Greater China market. Nathaniel is a member of the North Carolina Economic Development Association, a member of the Wake County Economic Development FDI Advisory Committee, as well as serves as the President of the RTP Chapter of the Carolinas Chinese Chamber of Commerce.
Eric J. Dufek, PhD, Research Scientist & Group Lead, Energy Storage & Advanced Vehicles, Idaho National Laboratory
Dr. Eric Dufek is the department manager for Idaho National Laboratory’s Energy Storage & Electric Transportation Department, overseeing over 40 research scientists, engineers, postdoctoral researchers and interns. The department focuses on advanced transportation systems with an emphasis on use, analysis and controls for electric vehicle infrastructure, the development, evaluation and identification of technology gaps for advanced battery technologies and analysis of current and future mobility systems. His research interests are in electrochemical systems with an emphasis on Li metal and Li-ion batteries. He has focused primarily on methods to better understand failure modes for batteries impact life and performance. This work has included how to enhance the life for high energy batteries as well as increasing the ability of batteries to charge at high rates. He has published over 80 peer reviewed journal articles in the fields of electrochemistry, batteries, interface modification, immunoassay development and corrosion. He received his bachelor’s in chemistry from the University of South Dakota and his doctorate in Analytical Chemistry (Electrochemistry) from the University of Wyoming. Before joining INL in 2010 he was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Utah.???
Maher El-Kady, Dr., Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder, Executive, Nanotech Energy
Dr. El-Kady is a prominent UCLA scientist known for his contributions to the field of nanotechnology and energy storage. He has made significant advancements in developing new materials and technologies for various applications, including batteries and supercapacitors, electronic devices, medical and healthcare devices, nanogenerators, solar cells and hydrogen cars. El-Kady's exceptional expertise positions him among the top 1% researchers in chemistry and materials science & engineering.
Amgad A. Elgowainy, PhD, Group Leader, Electrification & Infrastructure, Argonne National Laboratory
Dr. Amgad Elgowainy is a senior scientist and distinguished fellow at Argonne National Laboratory. He leads the Electrification and Infrastructure Group with a focus on environmental life cycle analysis and techno-economic analysis of hydrogen production, delivery, and fueling infrastructure, and end use applications. Dr. Elgowainy has contributed to the development of the environmental life cycle analysis models (GREET) since 2001 and the hydrogen infrastructure technoeconomic suite of models (HDSAM). These models are recognized by thousands of users globally. Dr. Elgowainy authored and coauthored more than 200 technical publications.
Huazhen Fang, PhD, Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering, University of Kansas
Huazhen Fang is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Kansas, where he joined in 2014 and has led the Information & Smart Systems Laboratory. He received his Ph.D., M.Sc., and B.Eng. from the University of California, San Diego in 2014. Prior to that, he received his M.Sc. and B.Eng. degrees from the University of Saskatchewan, Canada in 2009, and Northwestern Polytechnic University, China in 2006, respectively. His research interests lie at the intersections of control theory and machine learning for battery energy storage. He has received the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Award in 2009.
Alan Ferguson, Commercial Vice President, Battery Supply, North America, Li-Cycle Corp.
Alan Ferguson is the Commercial VP for the Americas region at Li-Cycle. In this role, Alan is responsible for establishing partnerships for the supply of battery materials into Li-Cycle facilities and for the marketing of the materials recovered from Li-Cycle processes. Prior to joining Li-Cycle, Alan worked in the electronics recycling and semiconductor industries. Alan holds degrees in both electrical engineering and economics from the University of Waterloo.
Donal P. Finegan, PhD, Staff Scientist Batteries, Electrified Transport, National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Donal Finegan is a senior scientist at the US DOE National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). His work focuses on understanding degradation and failure mechanisms of Li-ion batteries and taking steps to improve the performance and safety of cells and battery systems. Through his research, Donal pioneered the application of high-speed X-ray imaging to visualize rapid dynamic mechanisms that occur within Li-ion cells as they undergo thermal runaway. He collaborates extensively with the NASA Johnson Space Center on developing a Fractional Thermal Runaway Calorimeter (FTRC) and compiling data for the Battery Failure Databank, the largest open-source database on thermal runaway data from Li-ion cells. He received his B.Eng in Chemical Engineering from University College Dublin (UCD) and a Ph.D in Advanced Diagnostics of Batteries from University College London (UCL).
John Forgie, PhD, Electrochemistry Senior Manager, Accelera by Cummins
Dr. John Forgie is an Electrochemistry Senior Manager at Accelera by Cummins, where he leads the Electrochemistry team. John's group is responsible for the characterisation of Li-ion cells and modules for current and future customer programs for commercial vehicle batteries, with focus on electrochemical, thermal, and mechanical aspects and influences to optimise performance and life. In addition, the Electrochemistry team also research next generation cathodes and anodes.
Alejandro A. Franco, PhD, Professor, Reactivity & Chemistry of Solids Lab, University of Picardie Jules Verne
Prof. Alejandro A. Franco is Full Professor at the Universite de Picardie Jules Verne (Amiens, France). He is also Honorary Member of the Institut Universitaire de France and the leader of the Theory Open Platform at the ALISTORE European Research Institute. He holds an ERC consolidator grant for his project ARTISTIC (https://www.erc-artistic.eu/) on the digitalization of battery manufacturing processes based on multiscale modeling and artificial intelligence. He recently won an ERC Proof of Concept grant for his project SMARTISTIC on the assistance of battery manufacturers using digital technologies. He is/was involved in multiple projects dealing with the use of digitalization to assist battery R&D (e.g. EU PULSELION, EU BIG MAP, EU HELIS, EU POROUS4APP, and bilateral projects between Prof. Franco's group and industry). He is the Chairman of the Expert Group “Digitalization, Measurement Methods and Quality” in the LiPLANET battery manufacturing network and he won the French Prize for Pedagogy Innovation 2019 for his use of Virtual Reality to teach battery sciences. He is the author of more than 130 scientific articles and of more than 110 invited lectures in international conferences.
Peter Frischmann, PhD, Co-Founder & CEO, Sepion Technologies
Following a lifelong passion to power cars with solar energy, Pete Frischmann has devoted the past 10 years to advanced materials R&D for breakthrough energy storage technologies. In 2015 he co-founded Sepion Technologies, a California Bay-Area Startup, to commercialize ion-selective membrane products he co-invented at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab that boost the energy density, safety, and lifetime of lithium batteries. His technical expertise in chemical self-assembly provides a unique vantage point to leverage innovative materials to solve long-standing battery problems. With support from the prestigious Cyclotron Road Energy Technology Incubator (now Activate) and US Department of Energy, Pete transitioned his focus from technical leadership to deeptech entrepreneurship placing him at the crossroads of technology and business development. He has grown Sepion from a concept to Series A funded startup with 30 employees, co-invented 8 patents, and authored 26 peer-reviewed journal publications. Prior to Sepion, he was a Project Scientist at Berkeley Lab, JCESR Postdoctoral Fellow at Berkeley Lab, an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wurzburg in Germany, and he holds a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry from the University of British Columbia and a B.Sc. in chemistry from Idaho State University.
Akihito Fujita, Co-Head, Research & Consulting, Nomura Research Institute America, Inc.
Advised clients on both short- and long-term growth strategy while bridge-making between Asian-USA/European companies as a management consultant for more than 10 years. Expertise Area: Business strategy, Transformation, Cross border M&A, Business Due Diligence, Alliance advisory & PMI (Post Merger Integration). Industries: Chemical / materials and automotive / auto-parts / aerospace industries including lithium-ion battery and electric vehicle.
Yuan Gao, Independent Board Director, Nano One
A world-renowned inventor, Dr. Yuan Gao has over 25 years of experience in the complete supply chain of lithium-ion battery industry, from lithium extraction to batteries. One of his inventions, the Ti/Mg technology, enables high voltage lithium-ion batteries and is being practiced today in a vast majority of lithium-ion batteries for small portable electronics such as smart phones and tablets. Dr Yuan Gao joined Pulead Technology in May 2014 and had served as its President and CEO until Sept 2019 and currently he is Vice Chairman of the board. Concurrently he is serving on the Board of Directors of Lithium Americas Corporation. Previously Dr Gao served as a Corporate Vice President at Molycorp (USA), and a Global Marketing Director and Technology Manager, as well as other management positions at FMC Corporation (USA). Dr. Gao received his BSc from the University of Science and Technology of China, and his PhD in Physics from the University of British Columbia in Canada. He received his postdoc training from Professor Jeff Dahn’s lab at Simon Fraser University. He has also received Executive Education from The Wharton Business School, University of Pennsylvania in the USA.
Katharina Gerber, PhD, Account Development for Battery Vertical, Siemens Digital Industries Software
Katharina is the Account Development Specialist for the Battery Vertical at Siemens Digital Industries division. She is responsible for the growth of the Siemens’ Battery Vertical in the USA working closely with domestic battery project owners, regional stakeholders, and various business units at Siemens. Katharina has 10+ years’ experience in the battery and worked on commercialization of a variety of technologies ranging from the direct lithium extraction (DLE ) to dry battery electrode (DBE) process for sustainable battery manufacturing. In addition to her role at Siemens, Katharina is the industry advisor to the US DOE "Geothermal Lithium Extraction Prize" and a Co-chair of the “Electrode Materials Committee” at NAATBatt. Katharina holds a doctorate degree in Materials Science for the University of Bonn, Germany.
Forrest Gittleson, PhD, Manager, Solid-State Cell Engineering, Rivian
Dr. Gittleson leads a team focused on solid-state battery development and design at Rivian Automotive. Prior to joining Rivian, he managed BMW Group’s North American battery R&D portfolio from 2017-2021 and was a researcher at Sandia National Laboratories in California from 2015-2017, where he led projects on Li-air and solid-state batteries. He holds a PhD in chemical engineering from Yale University.
Tobias Glossmann, Principal Systems Engineer, HV Battery Research and Test Lab, Mercedes-Benz Research and Development North America
Tobias Glossmann has more than 18 years of experience in battery R&D at Mercedes-Benz. He holds advanced degrees in Electronics/Mechatronics engineering from Esslingen University of Applied Sciences and in Chemistry from Oakland University and he is pursuing a PhD in Biomedical Sciences. Over the years he has gained experience in a broad spectrum of issues that included high voltage system design, thermal management, battery controls, materials evaluation and system integration. His current responsibilities include battery research collaborations and development projects. His current research interests are interfaces in batteries and electrochemical sensors and advanced battery materials.
Rohan Gokhale, PhD, Applied Technology Manager, Umicore Rechargeable Battery Materials
Rohan Gokhale is the Applied Technology Manager for the Rechargeable Battery Materials Division of Umicore in North America. He has a strong background in materials science and electrochemistry. Rohan earned a Ph.D. in Chemistry (National Chemical Laboratory, India) working on novel ways to synthesize carbon materials for use in electrochemical energy storage and conversion. Subsequently, he contributed to the development of carbon based Pt-free electrocatalysts for achieving cost reduction in fuel cells, at the University of New Mexico. Before joining Umicore, he was a Research Scientist at the Nissan Tech Center of North America, working on solid state battery research program for next generation EVs. He has 20+ high impact publications and 3 awarded US patents to his credit.
Joshua Goldman, Vice President of Mobility, Xendee
Mr. Goldman is a 20+ year veteran of the Medium-Duty and Heavy-Duty Zero Emissions and Hybrid Fleet Vehicle Industry. Mr. Goldman has spent the past 22+ year developing Medium and Heavy Duty Buses and Truck working as an engineer, product manager and business development executive at many successful startups such as ISE, Proterra and TransPower. Joshua has experience with Battery Electric, hybrid and Hydrogen Fuel Cell Powertrains and vehicles and vehicles ranging from class 3 to class 8. Joshua is a proud father of two, an environmentalist and outdoor enthusiast.
Leslie Goodbody, Engineer, California Air Resources Board
Leslie has worked for CARB for 16 years and is currently managing incentive programs and working on heavy duty ZEV infrastructure efforts. She is overseeing numerous projects involving on-road demonstration and pilot deployments of fuel cell trucks, fuel cell and battery electric transit buses, high-capacity hydrogen fueling stations and depot charging. Leslie is also overseeing administration of $150 million in Volkswagen Environmental Mitigation Trust funding for Zero-Emission Class 8 trucks and low-NOx trucks and freight equipment. Leslie previously worked with CARB’s Advanced Clean Cars group focusing on automotive hydrogen fueling and charging infrastructure. She has a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Resources Engineering from Humboldt State University and 31 years working in the public and private sectors.
Thomas D. Gregory, Owner and Consultant, Borealis Technology Solutions LLC
Tom Gregory received his BS in chemical engineering from Case Western Reserve University in 1978 and his MS in 1979, specializing in electrochemical engineering. His 34-year career at Dow Chemical encompassed a variety of R&D roles including development and scale-up of production technology for organic, inorganic, polymer, and ceramic materials. He led pioneering rechargeable magnesium battery R&D and engaged in development of novel lithium ion battery and fuel cell-related technologies. Tom is currently a consultant specializing in chemical process analysis, design, and scale-up and electrochemical energy generation and storage. He is active in both AIChE and The Electrochemical Society and frequently serves on proposal review panels for the National Science Foundation and Department of Energy. He is the inventor or co-inventor on 16 U.S. and 42 foreign patents and has published or presented 25 papers in scientific journals and conferences.
Oliver Gross, MASc, SME Energy Storage and Conversion, Advanced Propulsion Technology, Stellantis
Oliver is the global Subject Matter Expert for Advanced Energy Storage and Conversion at Stellantis where he is responsible for the energy storage and fuel cell systems technology roadmaps and architecture. He is a member of the United States Advanced Battery Consortium Technical Advisory Committee, and chairs several additional committees, including manufacturing, 12V Stop Start and 48V Mild Hybrid batteries. He holds both a BS and a Master’s Degree in Materials Science, for the University of Toronto. Oliver has over 25 years’ experience in the advanced energy storage industry. He currently holds over 10 patents, and more than 20 publications.
Hakon Gruhn, Research Associate, Technical University of Braunschweig
Since finishing my master's degree in mechanical engineering, I have been working as a research associate at the Institute of Joining and Welding Technology at the TU Braunschweig for 2 years now. There I participate in the BatteryLabFactory (BLB). The BLB is a leading research center for battery processing in Europe. In this context, I mainly deal with the process steps of contacting and separation.
Saeid Habibi, PhD, Professor Mechanical Engineering, Center for Mechatronics & Hybrid Technologies, McMaster University
Dr. Habibi is the founder of EECOMOBILITY Inc., a Canadian start-up out of McMaster University. EECOMOBLTY specializes in AI software and has developed unique products for rapid characterization and production line testing of battery cells, modules, and pack. Dr. Habibi is also a Tier I Canada Research Chair and a full Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at McMaster University. He is the founder and the Director of the Centre for Mechatronics and Hybrid Technologies (CMHT). CHMT has created one of the most advanced and best-equipped automotive research laboratories in Canada and internationally specializing in battery characterization, testing, prognostics, and diagnostics. CMHT researchers have collaborated with industrial partners to design and commercialize unique test equipment that are sold internationally and have created unique testing and characterization capabilities. CMHT currently supports a number of large projects as well as being a resource to automotive companies and start-ups. Dr. Habibi is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and a Fellow of the Canadian Society of Mechanical Engineers (CSME).
Jon Haider, Capital Project Expert, Operations, McKinsey & Company
Jon Haider, PE is a Capital Projects Expert in our Southern California office, where he focuses primarily on gigafactory planning and construction, manufacturing operations optimization, energy storage systems, and related sustainability initiatives. With experience managing gigafactory projects at Tesla and Northvolt, Jon's practical knowledge offers a unique blend of insights that have contributed to successful planning, construction, and operation of such facilities.
Michael Harenbrock, PhD, Principal Expert, Engineering Electric Mobility, MANN+HUMMEL GmbH
Michael Harenbrock holds the position of Principal Expert, Electric Mobility at MANN+HUMMEL GmbH, a global leader in filtration solutions for the automotive industry. After receiving his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from WWU Munster in 1994, he worked in the chemical-pharmaceutical industry before joining MANN+HUMMEL in 1998 as Manager Materials Development Filter. Further positions in the company included Manager, Advanced Development Filtration Transportation and Manager, Advanced Development Electric Mobility & Fuel Cells. He has worked on fuel cell and battery projects since 2010. Through market and technology monitoring, he identifies the need for new innovative filtration solutions for Electric Mobility, and coordinates their related activities worldwide. International networking and collaboration in industry organizations are essential parts of his work. His passion is for Clean Transport - helping to protect man and environment from transport-related emissions.
Troy Hayes, PhD, PE, Practice Director, Director of Asia Offices and Principal Engineer, Materials and Corrosion Engineering, Exponent
Dr. Hayes focuses on battery design, manufacturing, and failure analysis. He has extensive experience in root cause analyses of battery failures, as well as conducting on-site technical manufacturing line evaluations. He assists clients by conducting design reviews of cells and packs to evaluate the potential for safety issues or field failures, in addition to evaluating vendors to help ensure they have the capability to produce batteries with required quality and safety.
Daniel Higgs, PhD, Director of Revenue, Business Development, Iontra Inc
Daniel Higgs, Ph.D. is the Director of Revenue at Iontra Inc, where he is driving rapid adoption of Iontra’s groundbreaking battery charging technology with multinational OEMs in various markets. Before joining Iontra, Daniel was the Director of Product Marketing at Forge Nano where he launched 3 products, sold over $15M, and developed a global distributor network. He is a named inventor on multiple patents and has presented at >40 international conferences.
Richard Holman, Senior Vice President, Battery Products, 6K Energy
Dr. Richard Holman received his Ph.D. in materials science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001. Dr. Holman spent over 10 years at A123Systems where he joined at its inception and ultimately served as Director of Core Cell Engineering, followed by 6 years at 24M technologies where he served as VP of Product Development working on next-generation lithium-ion technology. Dr. Holman has over 17 years of experience in the battery industry taking products from concept to production in the EV, grid, and power tool markets.
Peiman Hosseini, PhD, Director of Engineering, Engineering, Meta Materials, Inc.
Dr. Peiman Hosseini is Director of Engineering Operations in charge of the development of vacuum-based deposition technology at Meta Materials Inc. He previously served as CTO and CEO of Bodle Technologies, a company focusing on commercialization of new solid-state reflective display technology. A member of the Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Hub since 2014, he has published work in many prestigious journals and is a named inventor on over 20 patents.
David A. Howey, PhD, Professor, Engineering Science, University of Oxford
David Howey is a Professor of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford where he leads a group researching modelling and control of energy storage systems, with a particular focus on Li-ion batteries for electric vehicles and grid/off-grid storage, funded by Faraday Institution, EPSRC, EU and industry. He received an MEng degree in Electrical and Information Sciences from the University of Cambridge in 2002 and a PhD from Imperial College London in 2010. He is also co-founder of Brill Power Ltd., a company spun-out of his lab in 2016 focused on advanced battery management systems. Website: https://howey.eng.ox.ac.uk
Sachiya Inagaki, Vice President, Battery Material Supply Business, FREYR Battery Norway AS
Joined Freyr in May, 2021. He is VP Battery Material Supply Business and mainly in charge of Supplier Relations and Business Development with material manufactures. Before joining Freyr, he had been in a position of Executive General Manager of Industrial Technology unit in Yano Research Institute, and lead a dozens of market research and consulting projects as to LiB industries such as material, cell, application, process, reuse/recycling and etc. He was also in a position of Seoul Branch Office Manager and has broaden battery related networks mainly in Asia. During his previous position, he had joined this event several times as a speaker. He has acquired MBA of Tsukuba University in 2007.
Masa Ishigaki, PhD, Senior Researcher, Battery Research, Toyota Central R&D Labs, Inc.
Masa Ishigaki received the M.S. degree in electrical and electronic engineering from Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan, in 2007. Since 2007, he has been with Toyota Central R & D Labs, Inc., Nagakute, Japan. He received the Ph.D. in Engineering from Tokyo Metropolitan University, Tokyo, Japan, in 2021. He is leading electrical system research, including power electronics technologies, and also leading sustainable battery system research, including battery diagnosing technologies.
Nicolas Jaeckel, PhD, Senior Battery Expert, eCubator, Knorr Bremse AG
Nicolas Jackel finished his PhD in 2018 at the Saarland University in Saarbrucken, Germany with the focus on structure and properties of Supercapacitor and Lithium-Ion Battery electrodes. He continued at FEV as a System Engineer for battery-electric vehicles using the methods of Model-Based System Engineering. Since 2021 he works as the battery expert for Knorr-Bremse in the eCubator, an incubator focussing on the electrification of commercial vehicles.
Juergen Janek, PhD, Professor, Solid-State Ionics & Electrochemistry, Justus Liebig University, Giessen
Jurgen Janek has a chair for Physical Chemistry at Justus Liebig University in Giessen (JLU), is director of the JLU Center for Materials Research and Scientific Director of the BELLA lab at KIT, Karlsruhe. He was visiting professor at Seoul National University (South Korea), Tohoku University (Sendai, Japan), and D´Aix-Marseille (France), and he was awarded with an honorary doctorate from TU Delft (Netherlands). He holds numerous patents, has published more than 400 peer-reviewed papers and got numerous awards. His research interests focus on the physical chemistry of inorganic solids, solid state ionics, and reactivity, specifically on the properties of mixed ionic-electronic conductors, defect chemistry of ionic materials, kinetics of solid-state reactions, and solid-solid interfaces. In recent years, his research is focused strongly to the chemistry of battery materials, solid electrolytes, and solid-state batteries and operando studies of batteries. He is scientific coordinator of the German Cluster of Competence for Solid State Batteries FESTBATT funded by BMBF (Federal Ministry for Education and Research) and member of the DFG Cluster of Excellence POLIS at Ulm/Karlsruhe.
Judith Jeevarajan, PhD, Vice President and Executive Director, Electrochemical Safety Research Institute, UL Research Institutes
Dr. Judy Jeevarajan is the Vice President and Executive Director for the Electrochemical Safety Research Institute (ESRI) at UL Research Institutes (ULRI) with more than 25 years of experience in the area of battery safety research. She was inducted into UL’s Henry Merrill Society as a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in 2016 and as a Corporate Fellow in 2020. Dr. Jeevarajan serves in the Technical Working Group for standards organizations such as UL, Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), Society of Aerospace Engineers (SAE), International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), and American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and additionally serves as a member of the UN Informal working group that is working on the re-categorization of the hazards associated with lithium-based cells and batteries. From 1998 to 2003, Dr. Jeevarajan worked for Lockheed Martin Space Operations at National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)-Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, until 2003. In 2003, she started her work as a NASA civil servant where she was the Group Lead for Battery Safety and Advanced Technology. Dr. Jeevarajan represented the battery group on all NASA safety panels and was responsible for approving all batteries flown for human-rated space missions. Dr. Jeevarajan has several NASA awards to her credit with the NASA Engineering and Safety Center’s (NESC) Engineering Excellence Award and the Exceptional Service Award being noteworthy. She also won the Power Systems Award from AIAA in 2019 for her contributions to the safety of the human space flight and the ‘Woman Leader of the Year’ Award from the India Energy Storage Alliance (IESA) in 2020 for her active contribution in the area of energy storage safety. Dr. Jeevarajan is a published contributor on battery safety with more than 150 presentations at conferences and several journal publications. She has three book chapters to her credit. Dr. Jeevarajan earned her Ph.D. in Chemistry (Electrochemistry) from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa (1995) and holds a Master of Science in Chemistry from the University of Notre Dame (1991).
Nicholas M. Josefik, Mechanical Engineer, US Army Construction Engineering Research Lab
Nicholas M. Josefik is a Project Manager/Principal Investigator in the Energy Branch, Facilities Division, at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Engineer Research and development Center (ERDC) Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (CERL) in Champaign, IL. He is the fuel cell and distributed generation team lead, studying the performance of all types of fuel cells, hydrogen generation, electrolysis, and hydrogen storage technology in the military environment. Nick is the ERDC technical lead on the H2@Rescue emergency vehicle project. His research also includes harvesting hydrogen from wastewater to turn wastewater into an asset. He also leads research investigating building energy conservation and developing energy audit methodologies for the DoD.
James Kaschmitter, CEO, SpectraPower LLC
James Kaschmitter is the CEO of SpectraPower, which he founded in 2002. SpectraPower operates a battery research facility in Livermore, CA that performs contract energy storage research, consulting and expert witness services for government, private companies, law firms, startups and investors. Jim has founded, or co-founded, several companies in the energy storage field. He began research in Li-ion batteries in 1989 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). He was co-founder and CEO of PolyStor Corporation starting in 1993. PolyStor is the only U.S. company to have commercially manufactured in high volume in the U.S. all form factors of lithium-ion cells, including cylindrical, prismatic and polymer. In 1997 Jim founded PowerStor Corporation to commercialize the carbon aerogel supercapacitor that he co-invented at LLNL. PowerStor supercapacitors are now manufactured and sold in high volume by Eaton Bussman. He founded UltraCell in 2002, which successfully developed the world’s first reformed methanol micro fuel cell. UltraCell’s micro fuel cells are currently manufactured and sold by Brentronics and are deployed with U.S military and intelligence units, and are in use in combat in the Middle East. Jim holds a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and has a bachelor’s degree in the Physics Honors Program from the University of Utah. He holds more than 20 patents in the alternative energy field. He owns, maintains and operates an experimental aircraft and holds instrument and multi-engine ratings.
Kurt Kelty, Vice President, Automotive, Sila Nanotechnologies, Inc.
Kurt Kelty is the VP of Automotive at Sila Nanotechnologies, a battery materials company that enables lighter, higher energy density lithium-ion batteries for mass adoption of electric vehicles, longer-lasting portable electronics, and broader use of renewable power sources. Kelty brings more than 25 years of experience in the battery industry, including 11 years at Tesla, where he most recently served as Senior Director of Battery Technology. There he was responsible for leading numerous key initiatives, including setting the company’s battery cell usage strategy, delivering the batteries implemented in the Roadster, Model S/X and Model 3, and leading partnerships and material sourcing efforts at the Gigafactory, among many others. Prior to Tesla, Kelty was Director of Business Development at Panasonic, where he founded the U.S. battery R&D lab. Kelty holds a BA in Biology from Swarthmore College and a Master of Science from Stanford.
Nikolaus Keuth, PhD, Senior Group Product Manager, IODP XI Data Analytics Solutions, AVL List GmbH
After the studies of mechanical engineering with the focus on automotive engineering as well as automation and control theory at the Technical University in Vienna, Dr. Nikolaus Keuth did his PhD in automation and control with the focus on data driven modelling in 2004, at the Technical University in Vienna. Since 2005, he is working at AVL List GmbH in different roles starting from project manager, product manager, department manager for data analysis and modeling products. Currently, Dr. Nikolaus is product manager for data analytics products in the area of battery, cell development in the automotive market.
Chisu Kim, PhD, Director Research, CEETSE, Hydro Quebec Research Institute IREQ
Dr. Chisu Kim is a director of research and strategy of the Center of Excellence in Transportation Electrification and Energy Storage (CEETSE) at Hydro-Quebec, where she leads the development of next-generation battery technologies. She has over 25 years of experience in the battery field, with combined expertise in fundamental research and battery manufacturing. She has been working on battery R&D projects at Hydro-Quebec since 2012 and was responsible for multiple collaboration programs with industrial partners and national laboratories. Prior to joining Hydro-Quebec, she worked for the battery industry for 12 years developing commercial lithium-ion batteries for various applications ranging from IT devices to electric vehicles. She obtained her Ph.D in electrochemistry from Seoul National University in 2000.
Otto Kivi, Senior Business Development Specialist, Biomaterials, Stora Enso
Otto Kivi is working as a Senior Business Development Specialist at Stora Enso, focusing on company’s bio-based anode material Lignode. He has over 20 years of experience in commercializing new innovations, sales and business development. Stora Enso is a leading Global biomaterial company from Scandinavia, operations in 50 countries and turnover around 12 billion EUR.
Raimund Koerver, Ph.D., Director of Innovation, Factorial
Dr. Raimund Koerver is the Director of Innovation of Factorial Energy, a solid-state battery cell manufacturing company based in Woburn, Massachusetts. Prior to Factorial Energy, Raimund worked as a specialist for solid-state batteries at BMW’s Battery Cell Competence Center in Munich. Raimund earned his Ph.D. in physical chemistry with focus on sulfide solid-state batteries from Justus-Liebig University in Giessen under Prof. Jurgen Janek and holds several patents in advanced battery technology.
Kevin Konecky, Battery and Energy Storage Systems Consultant, Total Battery Consulting
Mr. Konecky brings over 20 years of xEV experience to his work, having worked on multiple complex designs for battery system development, charging system integration, and high-voltage powertrain integration. He is skilled in new product design and development, product testing, product safety, integration of multiple sub-systems for vehicles, new product launches and has expanded his skillset beyond batteries into power electronics. His experience in batteries includes multiple technologies (Li-ion, NiMH, UltraCapacitors, Lead-Acid). Mr. Konecky has worked for multiple OEM and Tier 1 battery suppliers (GM, Fisker, Byton, Cobasys, EnerDel, Lockheed Martin) and has a BS in Electrical Engineering from Clarkson University (Potsdam, NY) and MS from Purdue (IUPUI - Indianapolis, IN).
Tobias Krueger, Research Associate, Technical University of Braunschweig
Since finishing my Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering, I have been working as a research associate at the Institute for Joining and Welding at the TU Braunschweig in the department of Fiber Composites and Electromobility for 3 years now. In the BatteryLabFactory (BLB), one of the leading research facilities for battery processing in Europe, I am investigating the development and application of innovative drying processes for lithium-ion battery electrodes.
Ashok Lahiri, CTO, Technical Advisor & Co-Founder, ENOVIX Corp.
Ashok Lahiri has served as Enovix’s Chief Technology Officer since June 2007. From January 2003 to April 2007, he served as Senior Director, Process Development at FormFactor, Inc. From 1983 to 2002, he served as Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM, an information technology company. Mr. Lahiri received a B.S. with high honors in Chemical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. He has authored or co-authored over 79 patents and/or patent applications in battery technology, 3D architecture, electrochemistry, and precision machining.
Joshua Lamb, PhD, Special Scientific Advisor, OUSD R&E/Emerging Technologies, Office of the Undersecretary of Defense
Dr. Joshua Lamb is currently serving as a Special Scientific Advisor for Power and Energy with the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. He is on assignment from Sandia National Laboratories where he primarily led the energy storage safety program. Dr. Lamb earned his Ph.D. in Metallurgical Engineering in 2008 and his B.S. in Chemical Engineering in 2002 from the University of Nevada. Since joining Sandia in 2011, Joshua’s research interests include advanced techniques for determining the stability of lithium-ion batteries and the development of advanced battery abuse and safety tests.
Eli Leland, PhD, CTO and Co-Founder, Voltaiq, Inc.
Dr. Eli Leland is a Voltaiq co-founder and serves as the company’s Chief Technical Officer. Prior to Voltaiq, Eli worked at the CUNY Energy Institute as lead engineer on an ARPA-E energy storage and power conversion research project. Before CUNY, Dr. Leland worked at Trilogy Software, where he successfully deployed large-scale enterprise software systems to Fortune 500 companies. He was a Mirzayan Policy Fellow in Energy and Environmental Systems at the National Academies in Washington, DC. Eli has an MS and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley, and a BSE in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton.
Ping Liu, PhD, Professor and Director, Sustainable Power and Energy Center, University of California, San Diego
Dr. Ping Liu is Professor of Nanoengineering and Director of the Sustainable Power and Energy Center (SPEC) at University of California, San Diego. His research interests include lithium metal batteries, solid state batteries, and battery safety. Previously, Dr. Liu has led research programs in electrochemical conversion and storage as a staff member at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and as a manager at HRL Laboratories. Dr. Liu also served as a Program Director at Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E) where he drove the development of robust energy storage and thermal management technologies. Websites: http://liugroup.ucsd.edu; http://spec.ucsd.edu
Ryan Longchamps, PhD, Head Product Development, Engineering, EC Power LLC
After receiving his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Penn State University, Ryan joined EC Power as the Lead Battery Engineer. He has studied and developed thermally modulated cells since their inception and public release and has authored/co-authored 6 peer-reviewed publications relating to their functionality and applications. He currently serves as EC Power's head of product development, organizing efforts to commercialize EC Power's 30x intracell heating technology.
Mark H.L. Lu, PhD, Senior Industrial Analyst, Industrial Economics & Knowledge Center, Industrial Technology Research Institute
Mr. Lu graduated from Department of Business Administration in National Cheng-chi University, Taiwan, and continued to acquire an MBA degree from National Sun Yat-sen University. His first job concerned with the optical film in China for two years, then came back Taiwan to serve Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) as an analyst in Industry, Science and Technology International Strategy Center (ISTI) until now. As a certified industrial analyst of the biggest think-tank in Taiwan, he is responsible for the research about Taiwan battery-related industry, including material, cell, pack and related applications. Not only handling the official government statistics about Taiwan battery industry, sometimes he also plays a role to provide consulting suggestions for Taiwan government and firms. From 2010 to June 2020, he served as the secretary-general of the Taiwan Battery Association.
Jessica Durham Macholz, PhD, Materials Scientist, Argonne National Laboratory
Dr. Jessica Durham Macholz is a Materials Scientist in the Applied Materials Division at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL). She received her PhD in Chemistry from Stony Brook University in 2016 and joined Argonne as a postdoc in 2017. Jessica is part of the Materials Recycling R&D group working in the Materials Engineering Research Facility (MERF). She is a lead investigator in DOE’s ReCell Center for advanced battery recycling where she investigates safe and cost-effective recycling processes for lithium-ion batteries, specifically with respect to cell pre-processing, cathode/anode separation, cathode/cathode separation, extraction of critical materials from waste streams, and investigating the effect of impurities in recycled material. Jessica’s research currently focuses on developing and validating recycling technologies and conducting process R&D and scale-up of materials through collaborations with industry, academia, and other national laboratories.
Steven Marsh, Senior Engineering and Technology Director, Forum Mobility
As the Sr. Director of Engineering & Technology at Forum Mobility, Steven has deep knowledge in renewable energy and power technologies throughout the engineering lifecycle from manufacturing, to development, and construction. With 15 years of solar and battery experience, Steven has focused on the reliable deployment of new energy technologies at scale. At Amec Foster Wheeler, he leveraged his US solar manufacturing experience to establish programs ensuring the quality and reliability of millions of solar panels for the construction of multiple utility-scale projects. After Wood’s acquisition of Amec, Steven helped establish its Project Development Engineering consulting team in the US, providing engineering services to a global client base on over 10 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy projects annually, serving customers at all stages from early-stage development to commissioning. Steven is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and was a television guest on the show Mythbusters.
Fabrizio Martini, Co-Founder & CEO, Electra Vehicles, Inc.
Fabrizio Martini is an expert in energy storage technologies and has 12 years of prior experience in business and development in the ultracapacitor field. Before co-founding Electra in 2015, he was the Project Manager of several government-funded SBIRs for the DOE, DOD, and NASA managing over $10M. He has contributed to the accomplishment of six world records related to ultracapacitor technology and was in charge of the commercialization of the first-of-its-kind, high-temperature ultracapacitor for oil and gas and geothermal applications. Mr. Martini was the point of contact for several companies in the aerospace and defense field for the integration of ultracapacitor systems in their applications and he served as Principal Investigator of NASA SBIR program. He is author of 14 patents related to energy storage technologies.
Yasaman Masoudi, Engineer, BMS Algorithm, Stellantis
Yasaman Masoudi is the Lead BMS algorithms Engineer at FCA US LLC, where she is leading the development and validation of battery state estimation (SOx) algorithms. Prior to this role, she worked on thermal and climate control systems simulation and controls. She has a MSc in systems design engineering from University of Waterloo, and a BSc in mechanical engineering from Sharif University of technology.
Ahmad Mayyas, PhD, Professor, Industrial & Systems Engineering, Khalifa University
Dr. Mayyas is assistant professor of industrial and system engineering. He joined Khalifa University in fall 2018. Before that Dr. Mayyas worked as a clean energy systems analyst at the national renewable energy laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado. He is currently involved in R&D activities for composite materials, design and manufacturing of fuel cells, water electrolysis, and li-ion batteries. Dr. Mayyas got his Msc and a Ph.D. in Automotive Engineering from Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina. After graduation in 2012, Dr. Mayyas worked as a research fellow in the University of California-Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he worked with a team of senior researchers on developing a techno-economic analysis for stationary fuel cells. Dr. Mayyas also got his MBA in managing for sustainability from the University of Colorado in 2018. Dr. Mayyas has authored and co-authored more than 75 journal publications and technical reports.
Shirley Meng, PhD, Professor, University of Chicago; Chief Scientist, Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science, Argonne National Laboratory
Professor Y. Shirley Meng received her Ph.D. in Advance Materials for Micro & Nano Systems from the Singapore-MIT Alliance in 2005, after which she worked as a postdoc research fellow and became a research scientist at MIT. Shirley currently holds the Zable Endowed Chair Professor in Energy Technologies and is Professor of NanoEngineering and Materials Science, University of California San Diego (UCSD). She is the founding Director of the Sustainable Power and Energy Center (2015-2020) and was named as inaugural director of the Institute of Materials Discovery and Design. Professor Meng received the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award in 2011, UCSD Chancellor’s Interdisciplinary Collaboratories Award in 2013, C.W. Tobias Young Investigator Award of the Electrochemical Society (2016), International Coalition for Energy Storage and Innovation (ICESI) Inaugural Young Career Award (2018), American Chemical Society ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces Young Investigator Award (2018), a Finalist for the Blavatnik National Award (2018), International Battery Associations Research Award (2019) and Royal Chemical Society Faraday’s Medal (2020). She is the author and co-author of more than 225 peer-reviewed journal articles, 2 book chapter and 5 issued patents. Professor Meng serves on the executive committee for battery division at the Electrochemical Society and she is the Editor-in-Chief for MRS Energy & Sustainability. She is an elected fellow of the Electrochemical Society (FECS) and fellow of the Materials Research Society (FMRS).
Michael Metzger, PhD, Assistant Professor, Physics & Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University
Michael Metzger is the Herzberg-Dahn Chair and Assistant Professor at the Department of Physics and Atmospheric Science at Dalhousie University (since 2021). Metzger developed new methods to study the lifetime and aging of lithium-ion batteries at the Technical University of Munich in close collaboration with BASF and BMW (2013-2017). As a senior research engineer for Robert Bosch (2017-2020) in Sunnyvale, California, Metzger focused on solid-state batteries, lithium-ion batteries, and fuel cells. Most notably, Metzger co-developed on-line electrochemical mass spectrometry, an ultra-sensitive gas analysis technique that allows detection of small quantities of unwanted gases to diagnose battery cells (2015). Metzger also realized the first ever two-compartment battery test cell separating the positive and negative electrode through an edge-sealed solid lithium-ion conductor to study crosstalk phenomena (2016). The combination of both techniques led to the discovery of oxygen release from nickel-rich layered oxide cathode materials by Metzger and colleagues (2017). At Dalhousie University, Metzger leads a diverse group of young researchers that work on advanced lithium- and sodium-ion batteries. He is one of three principal investigators in the Dalhousie-Tesla research partnership on long-lived, high-energy density, and low-cost batteries for electric vehicles and stationary energy storage. This is the only academic research partnership of Tesla worldwide.
Chris Mi, PhD, Fellow, IEEE & SAE; Distinguished Professor, San Diego State University
Chris Mi is a fellow of IEEE and SAE, a Distinguished Professor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the Director of the US DOE-funded GATE Center for Electric Drive Transportation at San Diego State University, San Diego, California, USA. He was previously a professor at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, from 2001 to 2015. He received his BS and MS degrees from Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China, and his PhD degree from the University of Toronto, Canada, all in electrical engineering. Previously he was an electrical engineer with General Electric Canada, Inc. He also served as the CTO of 1Power Solutions and EV Safe Charge Inc. Dr. Mi is the recipient of the “Distinguished Teaching Award” and “Distinguished Research Award” of the University of Michigan, Dearborn. He is a recipient of the 2007 IEEE Region 4 “Outstanding Engineer Award,” “IEEE Southeastern Michigan Section Outstanding Professional Award,” and the “SAE Environmental Excellence in Transportation (E2T) Award.” He received three Best Paper Awards from IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics and two Power Electronics Prize Letter Awards. In 2019, he received the IEEE Power Electronics Emerging Technology Award. In 2022, he was named Albert W. Johnson Lecturer and Distinguished Professor of San Diego State University, the highest honor given to any SDSU faculty, and only one award is given each year. He served as an editor, editor-in-chief, area editor, and editor of over 20 journals and special issues of IEEE Transactions, He has served as the general chair or program chair of over 20 conferences. He has published more than 350 journal and conference papers, owns 20+ issued and pending patents, and delivered over 200 keynote speeches worldwide.
Andrew Miller, COO, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence
Andrew Miller holds the position of Chief Operating Officer (COO) at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence Ltd (Benchmark), a London-based market intelligence, consultancy and price reporting agency specializing in energy transition supply chains. Andrew oversees Benchmark's supply chain research and analysis, which stretches from long-term forecasting of supply, demand, costs, and pricing, through to sustainability assessments and bespoke advisory projects for a cross section of industry and regulatory stakeholders. At Benchmark, Andrew regularly presents to leading market participants, government bodies and industry forums, while also travelling to active mines, processing plants and manufacturing hubs across the world. He leads a global team of analysts and consultants and has advised some of the world’s leading institutional investors, auto OEMs, battery producers and mining companies. Prior to Benchmark, Andrew held a number of analyst positions across commodity research and finance, after graduating with a first-class honours degree in Economics from the University of East Anglia, UK.
James Mills, Principal Consultant, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence
Broad battery value chain expertise, capturing end-to-end mining development and automotive electric vehicle strategic purchasing. Commercial experience defining supplier evaluation and contractual negotiation process for Volkswagen AG’s in-house Power Co. battery critical mineral procurement, as a specialist in lithium and manganese. Responsible for value chain integration, procurement, and cost reduction analysis, delivering =€3bn contract value. Prior equity appraisal and capital raise support for public London-listed battery and high-tech metals and mining companies.
Gero Mimberg, Manager Thermal Systems, Kautex Textron GMBH
Dipl.-Ing. Gero Mimberg is a project lead in the thermal systems group at Kautex Textron, a global tier-1 supplier for plastic fuel tanks, clear vision systems (CVS), and other automotive systems. The thermal systems group at Kautex contributes thermal solutions to the Kautex development of novel HV battery housings out of thermoplastic composite materials for the era of electromobility. Gero studied in Germany and the US and holds a Diploma in mechanical engineering (Dipl.-Ing. equivalent to M.Sc.) from RWTH Aachen University, Germany. Afterward, he worked as a research engineer at the Institute for Automotive Engineering, pursuing his PhD on the utilization of a vehicle’s traction battery as thermal storage to reduce climate-related driving range variation and published several papers on the topics of battery system development, battery thermal management, and battery system testing.
Arwed Niestroj, Senior Vice President, E Mobility & Product, C Level, Sakuu Corp.
Arwed Niestroj is responsible for customer success functions and program management at Sakuu. While growing the company from its early days he has been General Manager Battery Business Unit and Sakuu’s Chief Operating Officer from 2019. Sakuu is reinventing large-scale, sustainable battery technology and manufacturing. He has also been a member of the Advisory Board of Predii and HyPoint for several years. In 2018 he was responsible for the global innovation hubs and digital transformation of ZF Friedrichshafen AG globally, driving the company’s innovation and transformation efforts and chairman of the board of subsidiary companies. From December 2014 to 2017 Arwed Niestroj was CEO of Mercedes-Benz Research and Development North America (MBRDNA) in California, comprising all R&D activities of Mercedes-Benz passenger cars in North America, ranging from technology research, digital technologies, self-driving cars, electric powertrain engineering, testing, software design to vehicle design and new mobility business models. In November 2011 Arwed Niestroj was founding CEO of the Daimler-Bosch joint venture EM-motive GmbH in Germany- developing and manufacturing electric motors for vehicle powertrains - that he ramped up until end of 2014 as Managing Director.
Bill Norman, Executive Director, BYD Auto
With an MBA from The University of Michigan, Stephen M. Ross School of Business, and BA from The Florida State University, School of Business, Bill has held many of the key management roles in sales management, marketing, finance, strategic planning, aftersales operations, supplier/vendor management, corporate OEM, dealership training, and franchise development of OEM dealerships. Currently in the role of Executive Director at BYD North America, with previous roles as Senior Group Manager Business Development - Hyundai Motor America - Genesis Division, National Sales Manager - for Nissan Motor Company - Infiniti Division. As Regional General Manager for Aston Martin the Americas, he oversaw the rapid expansion of the company’s sales and dealer network in the western hemisphere. Additionally, while Senior Dealer Development Manager at Mercedes-Benz USA, Mr. Norman established essential structures enabling increased sales growth with improved brand “share of voice” by implementing new corporate identity strategies throughout the dealership network in the United States. Currently, Mr. Norman is effectively establishing the much anticipated launch plans for BYD automobiles in The Americas. Additionally, Mr. Norman has written for and his work published frequently. As the owner of eleven recognized classic automobiles, Bill undertakes and appreciates the accurate restoration of older classic American and European sports cars. As passionate interest, Bill enjoys attending car shows and judging at various auto enthusiast events across the country. Mr. Norman has homes in Downtown Los Angeles, CA and in Florida where he resides with his wife and young daughter.
Sascha Nowak, PhD, Head of Analytics & Environmental, Electrochemical Energy Technology, University of Munster
Dr. Nowak studied Chemistry at the University of Munster and got his Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry. After his doctorate, he joined the working group of Professor Winter at the MEET Battery Research Center at the University of Munster in 2009 as a postdoctoral researcher, where he established the Analytical department. From 2010-12, he was the Head of the Analytics and Recycling competence areas, and since 2012, he has held a position at the MEET Battery Research Center as Head of the Analytics and Environment division, which mainly focuses on electrolyte aging, transition metal migration and surface investigations, recycling and second life, as well as toxicological investigations.
Michael O'Kronley, CEO, Ascend Elements
Michael O’Kronley was named CEO of Ascend Elements in March 2020 and has served on the company's board since 2017. Before Ascend Elements, he was Head of Corporate Strategy at A123 Systems. He has worked in the automotive and EV battery industries for over 25 years with previous business development, operations and engineering roles at Metaldyne Corp. and Robert Bosch. He holds bachelor's and master's degrees in Engineering from the University of Michigan. Based in Westborough, Mass., Ascend Elements is revolutionizing the production of lithium-ion battery materials by establishing a clean and sustainable supply chain using recycled feedstock. Its patented Hydro-to-Cathode™ technology directly synthesizes new cathode active materials from spent lithium-ion cells more efficiently than traditional methods, resulting in reduced cost, improved performance, and lowered GHG emissions. With fewer batteries going to landfill and a cleaner manufacturing process, Ascend Elements is taking the lithium-ion battery industry to a higher level with a truly sustainable, closed-loop battery economy.
Sue Ozdemir, CEO, Exro Technologies
One of the world’s proven leaders in the innovation and manufacturing of electric motors, Sue has nine years of accomplishments at General Electric, acting as CCO and the CEO of GE’s Small Industrial Motors Division, overseeing the division’s North American and International markets - ultimately building the division into a 160 million enterprise.
Chintan Pathak, PhD, Co-Founder & CPO, BattGenie
Dr. Chintan Pathak is the Co-Founder and CPO of BattGenie. He earned his PhD with data science specialization from the University of Washington where he worked on developing a decision support system to find the optimal locations of charging stations for electric vehicles for the state of WA. He has over 15 years of experience on software engineering and embedded systems. At BattGenie, he is in-charge of interfacing with customers to understand their requirements and developing BattGenie's AI & data strategy.
Ashish Patki, Director, Business Development and Market Intelligence, Livent
With over twelve years in the lithium industry, Ashish Patki leads business development and market intelligence at Livent. Livent’s portfolio of performance lithium compounds have applications in energy storage, polymers, aerospace alloys, and automotive and industrial greases. Ashish previously worked in biofuels and solar industries in engineering and commercial roles. Ashish holds a BS, chemical engineering from University of Pune, India, and MBA from Tulane University, New Orleans, LA. He lives in Charlotte.
Cameron Peebles, PhD, Battery Technical Manager, Alkegen
Cam Peebles first whet his teeth on batteries at The University of Texas at Austin during his PhD. He then went to Argonne National Laboratory as a Postdoctoral Fellow and investigated electrolytes, cathode materials, and diagnostic methods for lithium-ion batteries. After a couple years in Illinois he moved to San Diego to work at Wildcat Discovery Technologies as a lead scientist and then at Rivian Automotive as a Staff Cell Engineer. He has been the battery technical manager at Alkegen since late 2022.
Barry A. Perlmutter, President, Perlmutter & Idea Development (P&ID) LLC
Barry is President of Perlmutter & Idea Development LLC. He has over 39 years of technical engineering and business marketing experience in the field of solid-liquid separation including filtration, centrifugation, process drying, mixing and recycling. His strong professional skills focus on process solutions, innovation strategy, market expansion and business development. Barry has published and presented worldwide on applications in the chemical, pharmaceutical, and energy/environmental industries and has been responsible for introducing many European technologies into the Americas marketplace. His two books, published by Elsevier, Amsterdam, "Handbook of Solid-Liquid Filtration" and "Integration & Optimization of Unit Operations" are used worldwide for process guidance.
Ahmad A. Pesaran, PhD, Chief Energy Storage Engineer, National Renewable Energy Laboratory
After receiving his Ph.D. from UCLA, Ahmad has been working at NREL on energy efficient technologies including electrified vehicles. Until 2017, Ahmad was the Manager of the Energy Storage Group researching science and engineering of high energy anodes and cathodes, battery thermal management, 3D electrochemical-thermal modeling, safety and thermal runaway modeling, battery second use, techno-economic analysis of batteries for EVs; he led the Computer-Aided Engineering for Electric Drive Vehicle Batteries for Department of Energy (DOE).Between 2016 and 2018 he was detailed at the DOE's Vehicle Technologies Office (VTO) as technical advisor to the Battery program supporting battery processing, extreme fast charging and recycling. He was the Administrator for the first Phase of the DOE Battery Recycling Prize.Currently, Ahmad is pursuing energy storage business development activities for NREL and supports VTO with battery processing, manufacturing, solid electrolyte, and low-cobalt cathode projects.
Wilhelm Pfleging, PhD, Head of Group Laser Materials Processing/Lithium-Ion Batteries, Institute for Applied Materials (IAM-AWP), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
Wilhelm Pfleging is head of the group Laser Materials Processing at the Institute of Applied Materi-als (IAM-AWP) which is part of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). He received his Master (09/1993) and Ph.D. (01/1997) at the Fraunhofer Institute of Laser Technology (RWTH Aachen, Germany) in the field of pulsed laser deposition, laser micromachining, and electron spectroscopy. He has more than 27 years of experience in laser technology and material science. He has pub-lished over 160 peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals, books and conference reports (h-index 25). He is member of scientific and programme committees in several international conferences (e.g., IEEE 3M-NANO, CLEO, ICALEO, MRS, SPIE Photonics West) with focus on laser pro-cessing and energy storage materials. He has six patents granted. At KIT, he initiates and manages several industrial and academic collaborative research and development projects with emphasis on functional surfaces and energy storage systems. Since 2008 his research is focused on the devel-opment of laser-assisted processes, analytics (electrochemical analytics, laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy) and manufacturing of advanced lithium-ion batteries and related energy storage ma-terials (3D Battery). Furthermore, he is Senior Lecturer (Priv.-Doz.) at university (KIT) for “Laser Technology” and “Laser-assisted methods and their application for energy storage materials”.
Christophe Pillot, PhD, Director, Avicenne Energy
Christophe has built up considerable expertise in the area of batteries. He joined AVICENNE 26 years ago and spent 3 years in Japan analyzing the Japanese electronic, mobile & battery market. Christophe has acquired extensive experience in marketing, strategy analysis, technology and financial studies for the battery and power management fields. He developed the Battery market analysis for AVICENNE, which serves more than 220 customers worldwide. Christophe has published several annual surveys such as "The Rechargeable Battery Market". He is also the founder & chairman of Batteries - an international industry conference held in France since 1999. He is now Director at AVICENNE ENERGY. Globally, he has been involved in more than 300 projects for 200+ customers in the Battery value chain. Before joining AVICENNE, Christophe held a key position in FRANCE TELECOM's innovation division. He has a degree in Chemistry & an MBA in Innovation Management from Paris IX Dauphine. His mother tongue is French, and he speaks fluent English.
Gregory L. Plett, PhD, Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs
Professor Plett received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1998. Since then, he has been on the faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. His research focuses on control-systems theory as applied to the management of high-capacity battery systems, such as found in hybrid and electric vehicles. Current research efforts include: physics-based reduced-order modeling of ideal lithium-ion dynamics; system identification of physics-based model parameters using only current-voltage input-output data; physics-based reduced-order modeling of degradation mechanisms in electrochemical cells; estimation of cell internal state and degradation state; state-of-charge, state-of-health and state-of-life estimation; power and energy prediction; and battery pack fast charging.
Sebastian Pohlmann, PhD, Vice President, Automotive, Skeleton Technologies GmbH
Dr. Sebastian Pohlmann is the Vice President of Automotive and Business Development at Skeleton Technologies. He has been working on ultracapacitor technology for over 10 years and obtained his PhD from the University of Munster, Germany, and has so far authored and co-authored 9 publications on ultracapacitor technology. During his time at Skeleton Technologies, Dr. Pohlmann and his team have developed the highest energy density ultracapacitors to date, and today Dr. Pohlmann leads automotive sales and business development at Skeleton Technologies.
Matthias Preindl, PhD, Assistant Professor, Electrical Engineering, Columbia University
Matthias Preindl received the B.Sc. degree from the University of Padova (summa cum laude, 2008), the M.Sc. degree from ETH Zurich (2010), and the PhD degree from the University of Padova (2014), in electrical engineering. He is an Associate Professor at Columbia University, USA. Prior to joining Columbia in 2016, he was an R&D Engineer of Power Electronics and Drives at Leitwind AG (2010-2012), and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at McMaster University, Canada (2014-2015). Dr. Preindl serves as Area Editor of IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology and was the general chair of 2022 IEEE/AIAA ITEC+EATS. He is a Fellow of IET, Senior Member of IEEE, recipient of the NSF CAREER Award (2017), IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics best paper award (2019), and made the list of Fast Company's World Changing Ideas Awards (2022). His research interests include the design and control of motor drives, power electronics, and batteries for transportation electrification and renewable energy.
Wenzel Prochazka, Dr., Senior Product Manager Electrification Systems, Advanced Analog, NXP Semiconductors Austria GmbH
2002 - 2008 Mechanical Engineering for Mechatronics at the University of Graz in Austria and INSA Rouen, France.
2009 - 2013 PhD thesis about elechtrochemical ageing mechanisms of Lithium-ion cells for electrochemical ageing modelling.
2007 - 2023 AVL List GmbH, as Senior Product Manager for Battery Systems.
Since 2023 NXP as Senior Product Manager Electrification Systems for Battery and EV-Powertrain System offerings from the edge all the way to the cloud.
Balachandran Radhakrishnan, Principal Researcher, Nissan USA
I am a Computational Researcher with more than a decade of experience. I started with a Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering, followed by a Masters in Applied Mechanics from IIT Madras. Following a short stint in GE India, I pursued my PhD at the University of Michigan, where I worked on multi-scale electronic structure calculations to study defects in metals. I got trained in high-throughput DFT computations during my Post-doc at UCSD, where I studied various electrochemical systems, including all-solid-state batteries. After my post-doc in UCSD, I worked at NASA Ames Research Center as a contracted Materials Researcher on Li-O2 electrochemistry. In 2021, I joined Nissan, and worked on establishing a Materials Informatics team in its SV site.
Tobias Robben, Research Associate, Chair of Production Engineering of E-Mobility Components (PEM), RWTH Aachen University
Tobias Robben is a dedicated researcher and engineer with a strong focus on battery cell technology. Since 2021, he has been working as a Research Associate, specializing in the optimization of formation strategies and early quality determination through EIS for lithium-ion battery cells. Tobias’ expertise lies in understanding the intricacies of battery cell finalization strategies, which he has explored in several projects during his time at the Chair of Production Engineering of E-Mobility Components, RWTH Aachen. Tobias’ academic journey began in 2014 when he embarked on his studies in mechanical engineering, earning his Bachelor of Science degree. He continued his education and pursued a Master's degree in automotive engineering, which he successfully completed in 2021. Throughout his career, Tobias has demonstrated a strong commitment to advancing the field of battery cell technology. His research projects and contributions have been instrumental in developing strategies for optimizing battery formation processes and ensuring early quality determination.
Stephan Rohr, PhD, Co-CEO, TWAICE Battery Analytics Platform
Dr. Stephan Rohr is the Founder and Co-CEO at TWAICE. Before founding TWAICE, Stephan completed his Ph.D. at the Technical University of Munich after working in startups, PE, and in consulting. Stephan’s battery specific domain expertise derives from over 6 years of academic research into Li-ion batteries with a particular focus on the economic implications.
TWAICE battery analytics software helps companies working with batteries eliminate risks and enable opportunities at every step of the battery lifecycle.
Cyrus Rustomji, Dr., Co-Founder & CEO, South 8 Technologies
Dr. Rustomji earned his PhD from UCSD for his original work on developing South 8’s Liquefied Gas Electrolyte technology. Prior to earning his PhD, he worked with several companies developing products ranging from electrochemical capacitors, batteries, and space electronics. He has successfully led fundraising activities and teams on multiple projects including several federal, state, and industry grants and contracts and is author of several issued and pending patents and scientific publications.
Gerald Sammer, PhD, Principal Business Development Manager, Integrated & Open Development Platform, AVL List GmbH
Dr. Gerald Sammer, Principal Business Development Manager at AVL, received a M.Sc. in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering as well as a Ph.D. in Economics. 20+ years of experience in automotive technology with focus on lab solutions. Since 1999 member of the Technical Steering Committee in the automotive standardization body ASAM (www.asam.net).
Jeremy Schrooten, Ph.D., Vice President, Technology, Anovion Technologies
Dr. Schrooten brings over 20 years of technical and business leadership experience to his role as Vice President of Technology for Anovion. He is responsible for the Technology Center of Excellence that includes product and process research and development, customer technical support, and laboratory operations. Dr. Schrooten will oversee a team of researchers and engineers to develop proprietary manufacturing methodologies in Anovion’s full-scale battery laboratory.
Thomas Schuldt, Senior Engagement Manager, Battery Accelerator Sustainability Team, McKinsey
Thomas Schuldt is an Engagement Manager in the San Francisco office. His work has been mostly on electric vehicles, battery materials, battery recycling, circular economy and a range of other sustainability-related studies in Europe, North America and Asia focusing on highly strategic as well as hands-on operational projects. Thomas holds a Master of Science in Sustainability Management from Columbia University in New York City, and a double Bachelor of International Business from ESB Business School in Reutlingen (Germany) and Universidad Pontificia Comillas in Madrid.
Thomas Schwoerer, President, ZELTWANGER Leak Testing & Automation
Thomas has 20+ years of professional work experience in high-tech industrial equipment, from around the globe (Asia, Europe, North America). He held various managerial roles in Sales and General Management for industry leading companies in Leak Testing, Automation and Robotics, as well as Laser Technology.
Shazan Siddiqi, Technology Analyst, IDTechEx
Shazan Siddiqi is a Technology Analyst at IDTechEx working primarily on Electric Vehicles and Energy Storage. His background lies in the automotive industry after working in the corporate strategy and advanced manufacturing teams at Tata Motors on the company’s industry 4.0 plans. Shazan has developed technology benchmarking, implementation, and road mapping skills over the years to help assess opportunities and add value to organisations. Shazan is a regular contributor to various media outlets, providing insights and opinions from his research. Shazan holds a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering with first-class honours from the University of Manchester. As part of his role At IDTechEx, he leads the company’s coverage on the electric vehicle charging infrastructure, micro-mobility markets, and most recently the sodium-ion battery space.
Steve Sloop, PhD, President, OnTo Technology LLC
Steve Sloop has pioneered comprehensive methods to improve safety and efficiency in recycling lithium-ion batteries and materials. These include deactivation of lithium-ion batteries to eliminate hazards in transportation and storage; electrolyte extraction; electrode harvesting and separation; and cathode-healing™, which is a direct method to reintroduce lithium, structure, and performance to scrap electrodes.
Dee Strand, PhD, CSO, R&D, Wildcat Discovery Technologies, Inc.
Dr. Dee Strand is a Senior Scientist at Wildcat Discovery Technologies. Dr. Strand has over twenty years of experience in materials research, development, and commercialization, primarily in the areas of energy storage and electronic applications. Prior to joining Wildcat in 2013, Dr. Strand served as a Research Fellow at Dow Chemical, where she was the technical lead in Dow Energy Materials, as well as the Principal Investigator on external research programs with universities and national labs on battery materials. Dr. Strand also has extensive experience in patent analysis and technical due diligence of new technologies. Dr. Strand completed her PhD in Analytical Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, under the supervision of Professor John Schrag. Her PhD research focused on rheology and birefringence of polymeric solutions. Dr. Strand also holds a Master of Science degree in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry from North Dakota State University.
Mark Strauss, PhD, Research Engineer, Commercial & Business Development, Aqua Metals
Mark Strauss is passionate about developing and commercializing electrohydrometallugical strategies for circular supplies of critical resources. As a post-doctoral fellow at Idaho National Lab, he developed recycling strategies for the processing of waste lithium batteries into saleable lithium, copper, manganese cobalt and nickel products. His PhD research investigated hydrometallurgical strategies for recycling fluorescent lights. He is commercializing new sustainable recycling operations at Aqua Metals.
Charles Stuyck, Director, Battery Recycling Solutions, Umicore
Charles Stuyck obtained his Master of Science degree (MSc), in Energy at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) in 2009 and a Master in General Management one year later. In 2010 he joined Umicore. He completed several operations assignments within Electro-Optic Materials business unit, in Belgium and US. In 2014 he became Sales and Business Developments Manager within the Battery Recycling unit. In 2020 he moved to a Senior R&D Program Manager role for Rechargeable Battery Material Business Unit, leading large scale innovation programs across the cathode material value chain. Since June 2022, he is appointed Business Director for the Battery Recycling Business Unit, in charge of global supply, sales and business development, strategic roadmapping & partnerships.
Venkat R. Subramanian, PhD, Ernest Dashiell Cockrell Chair Engineering, Professor, Mechanical & Materials Science Engineering, University of Texas Austin
Prof. Venkat Subramanian is currently the Ernest Dashiell Cockrell II Professor of Mechanical & Material Science Engineering at the University of Texas, Austin. Prof. Subramanian received his B.Tech. degree in Chemical and Electrochemical Engineering from the Central Electrochemical Research Institute (CECRI), Karaikudi, India, in 1997 and the Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA, in 2001. His research interests include: energy systems engineering, electrochemical engineering, computationally efficient algorithms for state-of-charge (SOC) and state-of-health (SOH) estimation of lithium-ion batteries, multiscale simulation and design of energetic materials, kinetic Monte Carlo methods, model-based battery management system for electric transportation, and renewable microgrids and nonlinear model predictive control. Prof. Subramanian was awarded the Dean's award for excellence in graduate study in 2001 for his doctoral research. He is a Fellow of the Electrochemical Society and a past Technical Editor of the Journal of the Electrochemical Society. He was also the chair of the IEEE Division of the Electrochemical Society. His codes for Lithium-ion batteries are the fastest reported in the literature and his algorithm for solving index 1 nonlinear DAEs is the most robust compared to any other algorithm reported as of today. He is also the Co-Founder and CTO of BattGenie Inc. that is working to commercialize his research on Model-based Battery Management Systems.
Mark Szendro, Director, BASF Battery Materials, North America; CEO, BASF Toda America LLC, BASF Corporation
Mark Szendro is Director, BASF Battery Materials, North America and CEO of BASF Toda America LLC. Mark joined BASF in 1995. He had roles with increasing responsibilities and extensive experiences especially in automotive industry, e.g. Technical Sales, Marketing Consultancy, Business Management and Pricing Strategies. Mark earned his Executive MBA from IPADE Business School in Mexico City. He also has a BSc in Chemical Engineering from Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City.
Venkataraman Thangadurai, PhD, Professor, Chemistry, University of Calgary
Dr. Venkataraman Thangadurai is full professor of chemistry at the University of Calgary, Canada. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, United Kingdom. He received his BSc from Sacred Heart College in Tirupattur, India in 1989 and his MSc from Muthurangam Government Arts College in Vellore, India in 1991. He received his PhD from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India in 1999 and did his PDF at the University of Kiel, Germany. He received a prestigious PDF fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Bonn, Germany. Dr. Thangadurai received his Habilitation degree from the University of Kiel in 2004 and started his independent career in Calgary in 2005. He received the prestigious Keith Laidler Award from the Canadian Society for Chemistry (CSC) in 2016 for his outstanding contributions to physical chemistry. His current research activities include discovery of novel ceramic membranes and mixed ion and electron conductors for all-solid-state batteries, solid oxide cells, and electrochemical gas sensors.
Carl Thoemmes, Business Development, Battery Materials, Koura
Carl Thoemmes is currently Business Development for Battery Materials at Koura. As a global leader in fluorine and fluorinated products, Koura are currently scaling up domestic manufacturing in The United States of America for LiPF6, PVDF, Fluorinated Electrolyte Additives and Solvents, and Custom Electrolytes. Prior to that, Carl was the Vice President of Global Sales for Silatronix, a company that developes unique high-performance organosilicon electrolyte materials for use in Li-Ion batteries. Silatronix was acquired by Koura in November, 2021 and now serves as the Battery Material Center of Excellence for Koura's braoder battery material development efforts globally.
Antoni Tong, CEO, Smartville
As CEO and co-founder of Smartville, Dr. Antoni Tong leads the technology development and commercialization of its low-cost and scalable second-life battery energy storage solution. He has extensive expertise in lithium battery management, control, and their integration with the utility grid, distributed renewable resources, and electrified transportation. Prior to Smartville, He worked as a research scientist at UC San Diego and served as principal investigator for the energy storage integration lab.
Loraine Torres-Castro, PhD, Senior Technical Staff, Power Sources R&D, Sandia National Labs
Dr. Loraine Torres-Castro is a Senior Member of Technical Staff in the Power Sources Research and Development Group within Sandia National Laboratories. She joined Sandia in 2016, where her work has focused on the safety and reliability of batteries, particularly under abusive conditions. Her work in the Battery Abuse Testing Laboratory (BATLab) is focused on understanding the mechanisms that lead to energy storage system safety incidents which guide her in developing strategies to mitigate energy storage cell and system failures. Loraine earned her B.S. in Physics in 2010 and Ph.D. in Chemical Physics in 2016, both at the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras. Her dissertation work focused on the development of positive electrode materials for high energy Li-ion batteries.
Scott Trimboli, PhD, Associate Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs
Professor Trimboli’s research focuses on development of control strategies for the management of high-capacity battery systems such as found in electric vehicles. He is currently involved in multiple projects where he leads investigation on battery modeling and the application of model-predictive control to improve the performance and extend the lifetime of lithium ion battery cells. Other research efforts include: reduced-order modeling methods, modeling of lithium-ion degradation mechanisms, empirical and physics-based modeling of lithium-ion battery thermal properties, as well as predictive methods for power estimation.
Ulderico Ulissi, PhD, Manager, 21C Lab, Contemporary Amperex Technology Limited (CATL)
Dr. Ulderico Ulissi is a manager in technology assessment and system analysis at 21C Lab, part of Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL). Before, he worked in consulting and market research. He held technical roles as Battery Research Engineer at Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. (technical lead for energy storage technologies, AMIEO region) and as Senior Scientist at OXIS Energy ltd. (technical manager and team lead, cell design of pre-A-Sample Li-S batteries). He was awarded his doctorate (chemistry) in 2017 from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany), and holds both BSc and MSc (industrial chemistry) from Sapienza, University of Rome (Italy). He authored several scientific publications, five patents and one book on energy storage technologies.
Anna Vanderbruggen, PhD, Researcher, Geo Resources Laboratory, University of Lorraine
Dr. Anna Vanderbruggen is a mineral processing engineer who earned her degree from Ecole Nationale Superieure de Geologie (ENSG) in France, and completed the EMerald Erasmus Mundus Masters program, focusing on georesources engineering. After working with primary resources, she shifted her focus to secondary materials in 2018 with lithium-ion battery recycling, creating her own research project with a main focus on graphite recovery. Her passion and dedication to this research field led her to pursue a PhD at the Helmholtz Institute Freiberg and Aalto University, where she successfully defended her dissertation in 2022. Her innovative method on graphite recycling from used lithium-ion batteries earned her the EIT Change Award 2022. Currently, Anna Vanderbruggen is a post-doctoral researcher at the GeoRessources laboratory at the University of Lorraine in France, continuing her work on battery recycling. She is also a process engineer at ERZLABOR Advanced Solutions GmbH, where she provides consulting services to recycling companies. Dr. Vanderbruggen is committed to advancing sustainable resource management through her research and industry work.
Herminso Villarraga-Gomez, PhD, X-ray Quality Solutions Manager, Industrial Quality Solutions, ZEISS Industrial Metrology
Herminso Villarraga-Gomez is an X-ray Quality Solutions Manager at ZEISS. He specializes in industrial applications of dimensional metrology, 3D X-ray imaging/microscopy, computed tomography, and nondestructive evaluation. He holds a PhD in Optical Science and Engineering (University of North Carolina at Charlotte). He is the author of more than 50 peer-review articles & conference papers (+one book chapter and one book translation). He is a member of several professional associations promoting the advancement of engineering and applied physics. His current interests include contributing to the quality control industry and advancing novel technologies such as additive manufacturing and the emergent new energy/battery materials.
Gabrielle Vuylsteke, Research Engineer, Research & Advanced Engineering, Ford Motor Co.
Gabrielle Vuylsteke is a Research Engineer in Research and Advanced Engineering at Ford Motor Company. Her work focuses on electrified vehicle features and applying machine learning/artificial intelligence to high-voltage battery systems. She is part of a broader team delivering battery management and modeling solutions. She previously worked on projects at Ford including the 2020 F-150 launch, controls for the Mach-E, and advanced high voltage battery controls research. She is interested in developing customer-centric improvements to electrified vehicles and the broader sustainability context of electrified vehicles
Ralf Wagner, PhD, CEO, E-Lyte Innovations GmbH
Dr. Ralf Wagner graduated in the field of electrolytes for Li-Ion batteries in the working group of Prof. Martin Winter at the MEET Battery Research Center. During that time, Ralf Wagner works as an independent technology consultant in the field of Li-Ion technology for more than a year. Since 2018, Ralf Wagner has been working for Custom Cells Itzehoe GmbH as a senior project planner and sales manager. He has overall 12 years of experience in the field of Li-Ion batteries. Since May 2019 he is CEO and co-founder of the E-Lyte.
Thomas Waldmann, Project Manager & Scientist, ECM, Zentrum fur Sonnenenergie und Wasserstoff Forschung ZSW
Dr. rer. nat. Thomas Waldmann studied chemistry at Ulm University, where he received his PhD in physical chemistry. In 2011, he joined the ECM group at Zentrum fur Sonnenenergie- und Wasserstoff-Forschung Baden-Wurttemberg (ZSW). He became team leader of the Post-Mortem and aging mechanisms group at ZSW in 2017. Dr. Waldmann is interested in - Degradation mechanisms of Lithium-ion cells and Post-Mortem analysis - Method development - Inhomogeneous aging effects - Effect of cell design on aging and temperature distributions in cells - Interaction of aging mechanisms and safety - Knowledge-based extension of cycle life and charging strategies. Publications:(Selection from >100 conference contributions and >30 peer-reviewed scientific papers) - ‘Li plating as unwanted side reaction in commercial Li-ion cells - A review’, T. Waldmann, B.-I. Hogg, M. Wohlfahrt-Mehrens, J. Power Sources 384 (2018) 107, 10.1016/j.jpowsour.2018.02.063 - ‘Design and operating strategies for safe and long-life application of Li-ion cells - Post-Mortem analysis and thermal runaway tests’, T. Waldmann, M. Wohlfahrt-Mehrens et al., 2nd International Battery Safety Workshop, Albuquerque, USA (2017), invited talk - ‘Electrochemical, Post-Mortem, and ARC Analysis of Li-Ion Cell Safety in Second-Life Applications, T. Waldmann, K. Richter, M. Wohlfahrt-Mehrens et al., Electrochim. Acta 230 (2017) 454, 10.1149/2.0961713jes - ‘Review - Post-Mortem Analysis of Aged Lithium-Ion Batteries: Disassembly Methodology and Physico-Chemical Analysis Techniques’, T. Waldmann, M. Wohlfahrt-Mehrens et al., J. Electrochem. Soc. 163 (2016) A2149, 10.1149/2.1211609jes - ‘Influence of current collecting tab design on thermal and electrochemical performance of cylindrical Lithium-ion cells during high current discharge’, T. Waldmann, G. Geramifard, M. Wohlfahrt-Mehrens J. Energy Storage 5 (2016) 163-168, 10.1016/j.est.2015.12.007. - 'Temperature dependent ageing mechanisms in Lithium-ion batteries - A Post-Mortem Study', T. Waldmann, M. Wilka., M. Kasper, M. Fleischhammer, M. Wohlfahrt-Mehrens, Journal of Power Sources 262 (2014) 129, 10.1016/j.jpowsour.2014.03.112
Michael Wang, PhD, Group Center Director & Distinguished Fellow, Systems Assessment Center, Argonne National Lab
Dr. Michael Wang is a Distinguished Fellow and director of the Systems Assessment Center, Energy Systems Division at Argonne National Laboratory. Dr. Wang leads the ongoing development of Argonne’s GREET software model for life cycle analysis of vehicle technologies and transportation fuels. The GREET model and his research results have been used by regulatory agencies such as the California Air Resources Board, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to develop automotive fuel regulations. In addition to his work in the U.S., Dr. Wang has collaborated with government agencies, automotive companies, energy companies, universities and research institutions in Asia and Europe. Dr. Wang is a fellow of the Society of Automotive Engineers and a member of the Transportation Energy Committee of the Transportation Research Board. He served on the boards of NGOs, companies, and Chinese automotive research organizations, and is on the editorial boards of four international journals. Dr. Wang has over 270 publications in the areas of transportation energy and environment effects. He holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Environmental Science from University of California at Davis and a B.S. in Agricultural Meteorology from the China Agricultural University, Beijing.
Keven Wang, Co-Founder & CEO, UnitX
Keven Wang is the co-founder & CEO of UnitX, a robotics company automating visual inspection in factories. Keven previously led the desktop software team at RelateIQ (acquired by Salesforce for $390M). Keven graduated with an MS in Computer Science from Stanford University, and a BSE in Computer Science from University of Michigan.
Conghua Wang, PhD, CTO, TreadStone Technologies
Dr. Conghua “CH” Wang is the co-founder and CTO of TreadStone. He leads the technology development and commercialization of the corrosion resistant metal plate technology for fuel cell, battery and electrolyzer applications in last 10 years. Dr. Wang has extensive experiences in electrochemistry devices, advanced materials design and processing, corrosion protection, thin film materials, and has contributed his experiences in a variety of energy related technology developments, including PEM fuel cells, electrolyzers, solid oxide fuel cells, batteries, gas separation membranes. Before started TreadStone, Dr. Wang worked at Sarnoff Corporation as the technical leader in fuel cell technology development. Before jointed Sarnoff, he worked at University of Pennsylvania as a research associate. Dr. Wang received his Ph.D. degree in Physical Chemistry from University of Science and Technology, Beijing, China. Dr. Wang is a member of American Electrochemical Society, has over 20 publications and 10 US patents and patent applications.
Jay F. Whitacre, PhD, CEO & CTO, Materials Science & Engineering, Stratus Materials
Jay is a material scientist and physicist with over 25 years of technical, business, and academic experience. His career has been focused on understanding and developing electrochemical materials and systems with a focus on lithium-ion batteries, energy policy, and innovation theory. He is a Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the Materials Science and Engineering & Engineering and Public Policy departments, holds the Trustee Chair in Energy, and is currently on academic leave (after serving as the director of the Scott Institute for Energy Innovation for 6 years). Whitacre developed a novel aqueous battery chemistry that was manufactured and sold by Aquion Energy, a company he founded in 2008 that produced and shipped over 30 MWh of energy storage worldwide. Earlier in his career, he was a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he worked as a battery technologist, system engineer, and mission cognizant engineer. Jay holds a BA in Physics from Oberlin College as well as a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan.
Manuel Wieser, Head of Energy Business, AnteoTech
Manuel has a passion for innovation and international collaborations, with areas of technical expertise that include batteries, materials science, and nanotechnology. Working in the lithium-ion battery industry, Manuel has gained extensive experience in lithium-ion battery R&D and technology commercialization, while being instrumental in taking technology from lab scale to pilot production ready. As Head of the Energy Division at AnteoTech his work is focused on enabling high silicon content anodes leading the development of the AnteoTech’s silicon anode program. With a Master of Engineering in Materials and a Master of Business in Entrepreneurship, Manuel is skilled at leading technology development as well as commercialization activities and has participated in several successful substantial capital raises. Previously, Manuel led and pioneered the development of super lightweight, metallized-polymer, current collector technology, for lithium-ion batteries and next generation lithium metal anodes.
James Wilcox, PhD, Vice President, Enovix Mobility
James Wilcox, PhD, leads Enovix Mobility. In this capacity, he oversees the team’s efforts to expand into the EV marketplace and adapt and develop Enovix’s battery technology to meet EV specifications and technical demands. Dr. Wilcox joined Enovix in 2008 as part of the core engineering team that developed the company’s proprietary stacked cell architecture. From 2008-2017, Dr. Wilcox held technical roles at Enovix and served as the company’s principal R&D scientist and test engineering manager from 2011 to 2017. After a brief stint with Apple from 2017-2018 for a Special Projects Group, he returned to Enovix to lead business development strategy. He received his PhD from UC Berkeley in Materials Science and Engineering and completed his graduate student research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Martin Winter, PhD, Director & Professor, Electrochemical Energy Technology, University of Muenster
Martin Winter holds a professorship for “Materials Science, Energy and Electrochemistry” at Muenster University, Germany. He is a Director of the MEET Battery Research Center at Muenster University and of the Helmholtz-Institute Muenster (HI MS) “Ionics in Energy Storage”, a branch of Forschungszentrum Julich. Martin Winter is the spokesperson of German Battery Research. He holds several president and chairmen positions in scientific societies and is the recipient of more than 50 awards and recognitions.
Craig Wohlers, Executive Director, Conferences, Cambridge EnerTech
Since 2014, Craig has served as Executive Director of Conferences for Cambridge Enertech, with primary responsibilities for scientific conference organization and program development within energy market sectors with conferences based in the United States, Asia, and Europe. Previously to joining CII, from its inception in 1998, Craig was the Founder and President of the Knowledge Foundation, a scientific conference and publishing company until it was acquired by CII in 2014. Additionally, Craig was a Director at IBC USA (now Informa), and has previous experience in conference development, publishing and techincal marketing.
Kevin Wood, PhD, Senior Solutions Engineer, Voltaiq, Inc.
Dr. Kevin N. Wood is a Sr. Solutions Engineer and Electrochemistry Expert for Voltaiq. He is also currently an adjunct professor of Mechanical Engineering at San Diego State University. Before joining Voltaiq Dr. Wood was both a Professor and CTO managing over $7.5 Million dollars of battery related government and industry sponsored research projects since 2018. He has 5 Patents in the energy storage space and 25 peer reviewed journal publications focused on electrochemical data analysis. His technological advances in characterization and electrochemical analysis have been highlighted by the National Academy of Engineering, PBS, and the Discovery channel. In 2018 his advances were awarded impact paper of the year by Nature Publishing for Future Lithium-based Batteries. In 2021 Dr. Wood gave a TEDx talk on “The Coming Battery Revolution”.
Chao Yan, Founder & CEO, Princeton NuEnergy
Dr. Yan is a research scientist at Princeton University in the Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering and Chemical & Biological Engineering departments, where his research is mainly focused on energy conversion, fuels, and batteries. He is also a founder of Princeton NuEnergy (PNE) and a co-inventor of the direct recycling of lithium batteries technology based on LPAS (low-temperature plasma-assisted separation). He has published over 30+ high-impact publications and 40+ conference presentations in the energy field. He is a leading expert in physical chemistry and battery materials. He earned his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. In business, he has administered and operated a serial enterprise since 2014. Dr. Yan has combined his two passions of science and business by founding and leading PNE.
Yeong Yoo, Research Officer, Energy Mining & Environment Research Center, National Research Council Canada
Yeong Yoo with MSc in ceramic engineering has led many Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC), Hydrogen Storage, and Energy Storage (ES)-related projects as a project leader and Senior Research Officer at the National Research Council Canada (NRC). He has over 30 years experience in a variety of ES components and its integrated systems, including Ni-Zn/Ni-MH/Li-ion/Li-polymer batteries for portable and electric vehicle (EV) applications at Samsung in Korea and SOFC, hydrogen storage, abuse testing of Li-ion EV batteries, performance validation of ES system, Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) technologies, SOH diagnostics, and Repurposed BESS at NRC. He has published over 50 journal and conference proceedings papers with over 700 citations and filed 2 US patents, 7 US provisional patents, and 17 Korean patents.
Alice Yu, Senior Research Analyst, Metals and Mining Research, S&P Global Market Intelligence
Alice Yu is the Senior Analyst of Metals and Mining Research at S&P Global Market Intelligence. Alice launched the Lithium and Cobalt monthly report in June 2020, focusing on demand from the plug-in vehicles segment. She is now responsible for publishing a 5-year forecast on the lithium and cobalt markets. Alice has specialized in battery metals research for the past five years, she is currently based in Beijing, having also worked in Hong Kong and London as a metals and mining consultant.
Iryna V. Zenyuk, Associate Professor, Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, University of California Irvine
Professor Zenyuk holds a B.S. (2008) in mechanical engineering from the New York University Tandon School of Engineering. She continued her studies at Carnegie Mellon University, where she earned M.S. (2011) and Ph.D. (2013) in mechanical engineering. Her graduate work focused on fundamental understanding of electric double layers in electrochemical energy-conversion systems. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Electrochemical Technologies Group, Zenyuk joined the faculty of the Mechanical Engineering Department at Tufts University in 2015. In July 2018 she joined Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at University of California, Irvine, where she is also a Director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center. At UC Irvine, Zenyuk’s group works on enabling energy solutions by researching low-temperature hydrogen fuel-cells, Li-metal batteries and electrolyzers. Zenyuk works on design strategy encompassing novel materials, diagnostic tools and device-level testing. She is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award (2017), Interpore society Fraunhofer Award for Young Researchers (2017), Research Corporation for Science Advancement, Scialog Fellow in Advanced Energy Storage (2017-2019), Electrochemical Society (ECS) Toyota Young Investigator Award (2018), UCI Samueli School of Engineering Early Career Faculty Excellence in Research Award (2019) and ECS Energy Technology Division Srinivasan Young Investigator Award (2021), UCI Beal Applied Innovations Early Career Innovator of the Year (2021), UCI Samueli School of Engineering Mid Career Faculty Excellence in Research Award (2022). Prof. Zenyuk published over 80 journal publications and delivered more than 100 invited presentations on topics of energy conversion and storage.
John Zhang, PhD, CTO/CSO, Polypore International LP
John is recognized as the leading authority on lithium-ion battery safety and separators. He is a leader in establishing lithium-ion battery industry standards (P1625, P1725, and CTIA) through the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He has chaired and/or organized more than 60 international conferences and delivered more than 60 invited keynote or plenary speeches at various international conferences. John has published more than 110 patents, papers, and books, including the first ceramic coating separator patent (US 6, 432, 586) and some of the most cited papers (Chem. Reviews, 2004 and Li-ion safety papers 2006-now). Dr. Zhang received his Bachelor of Science Degree in Mechanical Engineering from Shanghai University. He holds a Master of Science Degree in Electrochemistry from Shandong University, and a Ph.D. in Material Chemistry from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has also completed additional Post Doctorate studies in Nuclear Interactions.
Larisa von Riewel, Ph.D, Ph.D, Senior Scientist, Innovation & Research, Heraeus Noblelight America
Larisa von Riewel holds a Ph.D in Applied Mathematics and a Ph.D in Theoretical Physics from university of Tubingen. Her areas of expertise are heat transfer mechanisms, interaction of radiation with matter and computational physics and chemistry focusing on industrial applications.
She has 24 years of theoretical and practical experience in academic and industry research and holds 30 patents and numerous scientifical publications in renowned international journals.
Currently, she leads the innovation and research activities for the global team promoting photonic solutions along the battery value chain.
